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WIENS FAMILIES FIND AUTOMATED FEEDING, MILKING AND MANURE HANDLING GIVE THEM MORE TIME FOR HERD MANAGEMENT – AND EACH OTHER
Bringing greater automation to their dairy farm has added to their quality of life
GRUNTHAL, MANITOBA – Brothers David and Charles Wiens now have more time to spend on herd management, have reduced annual operating costs, can do more management-oriented work with fewer people, and can spend more time with their families after automating their feeding, manure handling and milking systems in 2007.
Skyline Dairy, a third-generation farm founded in 1926, was named a “Farm of the Future” recently. The Wiens hosted area dairy farmers July 9th on a tour sponsored by Engineered Storage Products Company, manufacturers of Harvestore® and Slurrystore®, two of the systems essential to the advanced farming operation. In fact, the Wiens purchased the first Harvestore to ever be erected in Manitoba in 1971.
“Harvestore has come a long way since then,” says Charles. “We’ve always put good quality feed into our Harvestores and had good quality feed come out, but they were slow to unload until they came out with their new Alliance Unloaders®. Now with the XL Unloaders it has further increased the speed of unloading. Now our whole automated feeding system depends upon fast delivery. We can now feed faster with our conveyor system than we can with a pile. They also make bigger Harvestores that hold more – we have one that’s 25x106.” The Wiens have five Harvestores for haylage and high moisture grain on the main farm and another at a young stock farm nearby.
The brothers laid out their objectives and worked with Gordon Ross of United Livestock Systems to engineer and build the automated feeding and manure storage systems.
Smart, Push-Button Feeding
Feeding is a snap and takes just one person. The computerized feeding “smart panel” can be set to feed precisely measured rations to however many cows desired. Feed stored in the farm’s Harvestores is unloaded and conveyed to the TMR mixer in a central building within minutes. The mixed feed then moves upwards via an elevator to conveyors over the feed alley; feed drops down from above.
The farm also retains bunker storage for ryegrass, oats and peas which are manually added to the TMR.
“The only manual labor we have now is if we haul in a bucket load of feed here and there depending upon what feed ingredients you want to use,” says David. The brothers feed their 230-cow milking herd two times back-to-back in the morning and another two times in the evenings. Feeding a 230-cow herd used to take two hours, but now there’s no actual labor. That two hours saved can be directed to the actual management of the herd.
“We still have two full time employees and two part time employees. They are doing some work in the barn as well as feeding our heifers outside and at our youngstock farm. Of course in summer there is also cropping and harvesting work,” Charles adds.
Milking is also done automatically with a state-of-the-art DeLaval Robotic milking system put in at the same time the new 240-cow, 32,000-square foot freestall barn was built in 2007. Manure is automatically scraped from the new barn’s aisles into end pits where it is pumped to a 120x28 Slurrystore for storage.
“Feeding, milking and barn cleaning are the three areas we automated,” says David. “Just these three things save us about $80,000 per year in labor.”
Economical and Environmental Manure Management
Stricter environmental standards and a desire to improve their nutrient management system led the Wiens to purchase a 2.5 million gallon Slurrystore for use instead of a lagoon.
With the farm being located right beside a creek and the water table being very high, the Slurrystore was a perfect fit. The engineered structure alleviated any environmental concerns that would otherwise have been raised.
“We prefer the Slurrystore – manure injection is much easier and you can better utilize nutrients,” says Charles.
“At one point people put in lagoons because they were cheaper to construct, but that is not so much the case anymore. Manure storage has to meet certain standards and has to be engineered for containment,” adds David.
Regulations call for 400-day manure storage in a lagoon, whereas the Slurrystore is required to contain 210-220 days of manure storage for a 230-cow herd, David says.
On fields too far from the Slurrystore for manure injection, the Wiens spend about $120 per acre for fertilizer. “On those acres where we inject manure, we’re looking at $50 per acre for fertilizer,” David says. Working in the cost of application, and he says the farm saves about $40 per acre pumping from the Slurrystore.
“Application is much more precise over the old spreaders. We’re not pounding up and down the furrows with tankers and manure spreaders,” David explains.
Controlled Flow Milking Keeps Cows Moving in Right Direction
“Smart” gates read the transponders, moving cows not ready for milking back to their free stalls; likewise, cows ready to be milked cannot return to their bedding stalls unless they go through the robotic milker first. The system identifies non-productive cows that haven’t entered the parlor within 12 hours, how often they have been milked and their production.
“We don’t lose the 30 to 45 seconds it takes to reject a cow that has been milked but got into the parlor anyway,” says David.
A hard time finding labor for milking drew the Wiens to robotic milking. Few employees wanted to come twice a day to milk and considered themselves part time.
“Now, with a state-of-the-art system, we can attract better workers with a passion for what they are doing,” David adds. Each cow is milked an average of 2.8 times per day.
Milking most days is done with just a herdsman and a student who does chores. Before the robotic system, 4 to 4.5 people were needed to do chores and milk in their old parlor. Milking the entire herd would take around six hours. Four robotic stations are capable of milking 60 cows each.
“The old way, we were chasing cows into the parlor, tying and untying them, it was like a marathon. We wouldn’t have time to think about how to improve things,” Charles adds.
Herd health costs have gone down, too, David says, as the brothers now spend more time for bi-weekly herd health checkups and monitoring herd health overall.
Bringing automation to the Wiens dairy is the best decision they ever made, David and Charles say. What’s next?
Maybe another Harvestore? “We would put up another Harvestore when we’re ready for it,” says Charles. “It gives us the highest quality stored feed we could hope for.”
“United Livestock Systems has been very good to work with. They have been very open to any concerns we had. And there have been very few if any glitches,” David adds.
Bottom line?
“We have been in an expanding mode. Going forward, our focus is going to be on continuing to improve production, the dry cow program, things like bringing in cows that are ready to start milking on Day One, and making better use of home grown feedstuffs.”
Charles and his wife, Doris, have two children, Mark and Dana; and David and his wife, Denise, also have two – Elizabeth and Jasmine. “But above all, we are now enjoying spending more time with our families,” David says.
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