Milcotec gets milking robots working in Sweden

Milcotec gets milking robots working in Sweden

A week after Milcotec’s service engineers first visited a Swedish dairy farm with robot milking, the number of daily milkings had risen from 1.7 to 2.4 per cow. And the cell count, which had been above 500,000, had begun to come down.

‘It takes no more than 4½ hours for Milcotec to get here’.

So says Dutch-born Jonathan Boere, who runs Björkänga dairy farm, managing it on behalf of his father, Wim Boere. The farm is near Lövestad in southern Sweden, about 80 kilometres from the Øresund Bridge.

The farm’s 240 or so cows – Danish Black Pied, Danish Red Pied and Jerseys – are milked by means of five Lely A2 milking robots.

‘To put it bluntly, here in southern Sweden, service is a town in Russia, regardless of what it’s about. And Lely is no exception’, observes an audibly frustrated Jonathan Boere.

Many hours’ wait for service

‘We’ve found ourselves waiting many hours for service when there’s been something wrong with a milking robot. And, if it’s at an odd time, such as a Sunday evening, it doesn’t work at all’, he says, and goes on: ‘In December last year, it was going completely awry. When some Lely service engineers eventually arrived, they were people with insufficient experience, so they weren’t really able to solve the problems.

‘By then, we were right down to 1.7 milkings per cow per day, because of what turned out to be a relatively commonplace sensor fault. At the same time, the cell count had risen to more than 500,000 because the cows weren’t being milked properly’, continues Jonathan Boere.

Contacting Milcotec

‘By January, we’d had enough. We couldn’t live with the milking simply not working. After all, it affects udder health as well as yield. So’, he adds, ‘we contacted Milcotec’.

‘Just a week after Milcotec had been here, examined the milking robots and fixed the faults, we had got up to 2.4 milkings. In addition, the cell count had begun to come down’, recalls the south Sweden-based dairyman. ‘When we ring Milcotec, they are here about 4½ hours later – whatever the time of day. Sometimes they get here faster if they have a service van out on Zealand, as that shortens the driving time significantly’, explains Jonathan Boere.

‘I am very happy with Milcotec’s engineers. They are capable and skilled’, he says, adding:

Guidance by phone

‘They sometimes guide us over the phone so we can get things working that way. If that isn’t feasible, they often help us by providing a temporary solution over the phone so that we can milk at full capacity while they are on their way here. The last of the five Lely A2 milking robots at Björkänga Farm was bought used in the Netherlands. It was installed by Milcotec in September, and it works fine’.

At the moment, Jonathan Boere and his employees are themselves in the process of installing a lightweight, insulated structure around the robot to protect it from the frost when it arrives.

‘With five milking robots, we have plenty of milking capacity, so we have the possibility of bringing a few more cows in’, he says, adding:

‘Milcotec are now carrying out service and repairs for us once per quarter. Even though it’s a competing brand, we also buy spare parts for our five milking robots from them’.

Came from Denmark

Before settling in southern Sweden, for many years the Boere family ran a dairy farm in eastern Funen, which they decided to sell.

‘We sold the farm we had then on Funen in Denmark. One reason was that we were able to get a good price for it, as there was high demand for land in the area. A large part of the reason we then opted to settle in southern Sweden was that it was relatively cheap at the time’, explains Jonathan Boere.

There are 184 hectares belonging to Björkänga Farm. The farm also cultivates 120 hectares that are rented.

As well as home-grown grass and maize, the cows are fed on dried sugar beet pulp and draff from a Danish brewery.