Learning from the Irish: Dutch robotic milking operators visited pastureland

"If you want the cows to graze in the pasture, you shouldn’t overfeed them in the barn" and "if you want to make good use of the pasture grass on your farm, you should definitely walk around all your fields at least once a week to monitor the grass growth."

These are just a couple of the lessons that dairy farmer Jan Dirk de Wit from Hazerswoude is taking home with him after a visit to Ireland. At the invitation of the ‘Robots and Pastures? A Perfect Match!’ project, he and three colleagues visited Irish farmers who combine robotic milking with day and night grazing.

The best farmers exploit pasture grass
In Ireland, milk production is based on pasture grass. The cows calve in early spring and are put out to pasture day and night as soon as possible. Supplementary feed is limited to a few kilos of concentrate per day and a small amount of grass silage to get through the short winter. Irish farmers who are the most economically successful are those who get the maximum amount of pasture grass into their cows and purchase the minimum amount of concentrate.

Striving for a high intake of pasture grass seems less compatible with automatic milking. After all, this requires the cows to be brought into the barn several times a day. Nevertheless, the number of robotic farms is slowly but surely increasing in Ireland too. At present, around nine per cent of Irish dairy farmers use automatic milking.

ABC grazing encourages robot visits
In the south of Ireland, Dutch dairy farmers took a leaf out of the book of several farms that successfully combine automated milking with full-time grazing. They visited a farm, for example, which uses two robots to milk up to 180 cows that graze in the pasture day and night.

The key to the success of the Irish robotic milking farms is the so-called ABC pasture system, in which the home paddock is divided into three blocks (A, B and C). Every eight hours, the cows are given access to a fresh patch of grass in each block. That means a fresh block of grass three times a day. The size of each block is tailored to the herd’s grass intake so that the patch is evenly grazed down to a stubble of about four centimetres in roughly eight hours. 

Access to a fresh block of grass encourages the cows to move around. After all, they have nothing else to eat. To reach a new plot, the animals must pass through a selection gate near the farm. Cows due for milking are directed towards the robot and can only go to the pasture after they have been milked. This ensures that all cows are milked approximately twice a day. This is sufficient for an average annual production of between 5,000 and 6,000 kg of milk.

Get the basics right for success
"To successfully combine robotic milking with grazing, you need to get the basics right", is the lesson that young dairy farmer Jarno Bisschop is taking back to his farm in Rouveen. "That means, for example, carefully planning the layout of calf paths so that you create a grazing platform where you can flexibly divide the fields."

With their heads full of impressions, the farmers boarded the plane again. Plenty to think about for their farms back home. The first order for pasture posts and wire has already been placed. 

Over the coming weeks, we will take you through the ‘tips and tricks’ of Irish robotic milking farmers in a series of partner posts. So keep a close eye on this webpage.