AUDIO: Andy Lenkaitis with GEA discusses the efficiencies of rotary milking parlors and why more farms are considering them for their next upgrade with Brownfield’s Larry Lee.
A dairy equipment supplier says more producers are considering rotary parlors when upgrading.
Andy Lenkaitis with GEA tells Brownfield the move to rotary milking parlors is about efficiency for employees and consistency for the cows. “And, as we see farms change in size and kind of bring more cows home, it’s a great way to expand the existing facility.”
Lenkaitis says once a dairy herd reaches a certain size, the rotary has more advantages than robotic milkers and parallel parlors. “When you look at everything from labor efficiency, cost of ownership, maintenance, all of those things, and how that impacts your cost of production, really, once you get over that eight or ten robots, does it really make sense to spread those across the farm or do we look at bringing all of the cows to a central milking facility? Once you get maybe above a thousand cows or so, rotaries make a lot more sense.”
Lenkaitis says planning, building, and starting a new rotary parlor usually takes three to four years, and the biggest mistake producers make is rushing to use the new system by a certain date. “That commissioning step, those maybe two or three weeks that we go through with the installing dealer and set and make sure everything is talking to each other, everything is firing how it should, because once those cows come on, it’s no longer a construction site, it’s a milking parlor and we want to make sure those cows have that best opportunity for transitioning from what they were on to that new system.”
He says it doesn’t matter what new system the farm has; the first milking must go smoothly for the cows and the employees.
