New milking parlour to be installed while the old one is in use

New milking parlour to be installed while the old one is in use

In September, Milcotec will start installation of a Dairymaster milking parlour for farmer Jørn Friis Møller of Aarslev, near Aabenraa. The parlour is to be installed in the same place as the present one, while production carries on.

Jørn Friis is busy with the harvest, but has taken a break. He stands outside the milking parlour and points inside – this is where the milking parlour is, and also where the new one will be fitted. The parlour will be installed during September, and the metalworker and engineers will have to get in between milkings, because production has to be attended to at the same time.

‘The cows will still have to be milked, after all, so the idea is to hang the swing-over up first. Then, when the new parts are ready, they’ll dismantle the old system, drop the new one in and finish off the installation’, says Jørn Friis, who is excited to see how it works out. The engineers have visited several times to measure up, because the new parlour has to fit into the old milking parlour exactly.

Hoping for faster milking

The current milking parlour is a 12-unit DeLaval from 2002, and Jørn Friis hopes the new swing-18 parlour can make milking the farm’s 450 dairy cows faster:

‘Now, we milk twice a day, and we spend a total of 11-12 hours a day milking. I hope we can save 2-3 hours a day, but we’ll have to see. It also depends how quickly we can get the cows through the system and back out’, says Jørn Friis.

Jørn Friis employs five workers on the farm, which also has 190 hectares of land. He runs the farm together with his wife, and he is the fourteenth generation at Aarslev farm.

‘I don’t want an unhappy workplace where my workers spend as much time milking as they do now. I hope they can have a better working day than they do now, and maybe have a weekly day off. After all, I want to hold onto my workers’, says Jørn Friis.

Out with the robots

Jørn Friis used to have milking robots, and the plan was for him to have seven robots, but that was abandoned back in 2011:

‘The robots didn’t suit me at all. There were too many problems and little things that irritated me’, says Jørn Friis, who thinks that robot parlours are better suited to smaller operations with 100-150 dairy cows.

‘Fortunately, I stopped in time and sold the robots on. Milcotec helped me with that, too. A farmer from Bavaria in Germany came and collected them.

Milcotec has also sold the old, current milking parlour for Jørn Friis. Jørn Friis previously hired a Mobistar, which is a mobile milking parlour, and he was taken with the low costs of the system, the good service and the fact that ‘the system also milks really well’.

He has now made an agreement with Milcotec to lease the Dairymaster milking parlour. ‘It’s a good arrangement that makes it possible for me to get the new milking parlour. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I’d had to purchase it’.