We found that many of our cows were not getting as much feed as they should. Drilling down, we found several reasons:
- Our maximum amount of feed per visit was too low (3.5lb). High producing cows were not getting all of their feed. We increased this to 5.5lb. This allows a cow to get as much as 11lb on days that she only visits the robot 2X. The only potential problem with this would be cows eating too much concentrate at a given time – we don’t think we are anywhere near this problem.
- Calculating rations once every 7 days – this is not often enough. Cows milk production changes too much in 7 days. If that 7th day is a low one by chance, it leaves her without enough feed for the whole next week. Delaval informed us that the reason to not calculate more often is because of errors in the Ration Calculation Log – cows that are in Step Up or Step Down mode will generate an error in the log. This was causing too much confusion for farmers, so Delaval moved the calculation out to 7 days. This gives enough time for the step up or down to complete before the next calculation. My belief is that if I calculate every day, the changes will be small enough that I won’t have many cows stepping up more than 1 day.
- Dispensing rate – this can be calculated by max dispense / stall time. 5.5lb / 8 min => 0.685 lb/min. However we have to allow time for when the cow’s head is up, and time at the end after all but one cup are off. We are going to try a 0.8 lb/min rate.
- Feed table timing – many cows were going above the 10lb feeding rate before the feed table started at 21 days. The table will not start at 14 days.
Much of this data was obtained by using an Excel tool that generated graphs like this:
