The milking parlours featured in this week's Focus are all for large herds. While the average herd size in Ireland is still around 80 cows, I think there are as many lessons from looking at a large parlour, as there are from a smaller one.

Features can always be adapted to suit smaller herds and smaller parlours.

We travelled to the UK to visit two parlours; both are new builds, both are built on leased land and both can be described as low cost, even if they are very different. But when we delve into the costs, there is nothing cheap about them.

The milking parlour is probably the single biggest investment on a dairy farm, after the cows, and even basic no-frills parlours are expensive to build.

The thing to remember is that unnecessary costs are minimised on these parlours in order to increase the return on investment from leasing the land and there is a big lesson in this for everyone, whether on leased land or not.

When considering upgrading your own parlour, seek as much advice as possible and visit as many parlours as possible before making a decision.

Key decisions

For me, the key decisions are not so much the make or the number of gadgets to install, it is the location of the parlour and its position in the farm relative to farm roadways, sheds and milk tanker access.

This will have a massive bearing on cow flow.

Make sure that the chosen parlour can be expanded in years to come, both the number of units and the size of the collecting yard.