Cow Heaven
00:00 Exterior
– Cow Barn
Interior
pan
Hopper
delivering food
Hydraulic
“broom” cleaning floor
c.u.
Cow at automatic “back scratcher”
Wide
of cow at scratcher
Cow
entering milking cubicle
Low
interior shot of cow in robotic milker
c.u.
LCD display
c.u.
milker attaching to udder
c.u.
LCD display
Milk
flowing in milking tubes
Pan
along cow and robotic milker
Guide Voice: It looks like just another farm
building to you and me - but to a cow this is 5 star
accommodation.
A sort of bovine Health Spa!
Room service provides regular healthy and nutritional meals.
There's constant attention from Housekeeping; and there's even the
opportunity for a massage and a little personal grooming!
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the University of
Nottingham's state of the art dairy facility is the milking rooms -
they're self service!
The robotic milking machines in this facility allow the cows to
make the decision as to when, and how often, they want to be
milked. This is a major departure from more traditional milking
machine methods, where cows are forced to fit in with a farm
routine.
00:44 SOT – Dr Phil Garnsworthy, Senior Lecturer
in Animal Production, University of Nottingham:
“We find the cows are far more content in this system,
there’s no pressure on them. In the old system we would get
them up twice a day and force them into a collecting yard ready to
be milked and they’d have to wait there until we would take
them out and milk them. With this system the cows are free to go
and milk themselves so there’s no pressure on them and they
can just choose when they want to milk and some like to be milked
at two or three in the morning some will go in the afternoon and
they can milk up to six times a day, it averages about three times
a day but they can choose exactly when they like”.
01:22 Exterior of Dairy
Centre
Interior
of Cow Barn – Professor Seabrook & Dr Garnsworthy
discussing animals
Tilt
down from feed gauge to cow at food hopper
Guide Voice: The University of
Nottingham’s Dairy Centre is part of a working farm, so their
research is designed to find practical and applicable solutions to
the problems of modern farming.
01:32 SOT – Professor Martin Seabrook, Director of
University Farms, University of Nottingham: The
function of the university farm is really three-fold.
One is to provide an educational experience for students.
Secondly to provide an environment for research and because those
cost money and they’re very expensive to run research
programmes, it’s very expensive to provide an education, we
want the farm to make us some money commercially which we can then,
as it were, plough back into education and research.
01:59 Cow leaving
robotic milking cubicle
Cow
lying in stall
Line
of cows eating silage
Wide
of cows in Barn
Guide Voice: A robotic milking machine may
sound like something from a science fiction story but the results
in terms of increased milk yield and improved animal welfare are
impressive. The unit has seen increases in the milk yield of up to
10% in some animals and mastitis, one of the major health problems
of dairy herds has been significantly reduced.
02:18 SOT – Dr Phil Garnsworthy:
“When we had our old conventional system we were getting
about four cases of mastitis a week, we’re now getting much
less, it may only be about two a month so it’s tremendously
improved the mastitis situation and also each individual cow has a
lower mastitis burden now the average mastitis cell count in the UK
is 250,000 ours is down somewhere around 100,000”.
02:49 Tilt down
from robotic feeder to show food preparation
Food
hopper moving along feeding area
Food
portion being prepared in feeder
Cow
waiting by feeder
Food
on internal conveyor
Food
delivered to cow
Herdsman
giving cows food “treat”
Cow
and calf
c.u
calf
Cows
in stall
Guide Voice: The University is also conducting
research into the nutrition of the herd. The modern milk producer
wants milk with a high protein content for cheese manufacture and
with less saturated butter fats to provide a healthier product. By
providing a mix of foods and monitoring portions the researchers
are aiming to improve the end quality of the milk and the general
well being of the cows.
Stockmen are still employed, but because a lot of the mundane
and time consuming work of dairy farming is now handled by robotic
systems they have more time to spend with the animals, observing
them and looking after their welfare.
So – is a robotic system the future of Dairy Farming?
03:28 SOT – Professor Martin
Seabrook: “Robots fitted very nicely
within the university’s research environment , the
university’s ethos of going forward and developing things for
the future rather than just taking the best of current technology
which would have been a soft option to take the best that’s
currently there, we wanted to be part of the development process
and we felt that robotics was the next step”.
03:50
End of cut
Additional Material
03.54 SOT – Nigel Armstrong, Head Herdsman,
University of Nottingham’s Dairy Centre:
“The main thing with the robotic milking is you
haven’t got your fixed twice a day milking routine so
it’s a lot more flexible the cows are being milked all the
time throughout twenty-four hours. You’ve still got routing
jobs but it’s a lot more flexible when you can do those.
You’re not stuck in a twice a day milking
routine”.
04:12 c.u.
Robotic Milker LCD (Udder Cleaning)
c.u.
Udder cleaning
Milk
flowing in pipes
Wide
of milking in action
c.u.
Milker disconnecting from teats
wide
interior, Cow leaving milker
c.u
Robotic Milker LCD (Standby)
04:40
END
