This week, I feature a fine collecting yard, which has shortened the milking routine by a valuable 20 minutes. It’s on the farm of Noel Griffin of Cappoquin, Co Waterford, who farms with his wife, Sinéad, and his uncle, John Hickey.

Noel expanded to a 20-unit herringbone parlour in 2008 and increased cow numbers. However, the collecting yard was too small and milked cows had to walk across cows waiting to enter the parlour. This meant Noel had to come out of the parlour and move both gates and cows. “It was too much messing about,” he said. So, last November, Noel called in local building contractors William Downey and Padraig O’Brien, based in Aglish, and asked them to build him a new collecting yard with a scraper backing gate.

Picture one

The new setup comprises the collecting yard on the right and an exit passage on the left. Both are scraped. Noel fitted feed rails on each side of the collecting yard to allow buffer feeding of silage. There are spaces for 120 cows to buffer feed, plenty for the 170 milked this summer. In the middle of the yard is a feed passage for placing silage.

Picture two

The collecting yard is 6m wide and 45m long. At the end, there are gates on each side to allow cows enter from paddocks.

Picture three, four and five

The scraper backing gate is a Dairymaster unit with automatic or manual controls. Here (picture four), the scraper blades are tilted upwards as the gate has returned to its starting position. Once the backing gate moves forward (picture five), the blades will rotate downwards into the scraping position.

Picture six

The exit passage is 3m wide. Steel posts with electric fence separate it from the feed passage on the right, where silage is placed when cows are being fed. A low kerb on each side keeps in slurry.

Picture seven

The standard diagonal feed barriers are attached to stub pillars and sit over a 20in-high shuttered concrete wall. This wall is 7in thick. The pillars are a strong 8in by 4in. The steelwork was made up by local firm Precision Engineering.

Picture eight

The collecting yard has standing capacity for 200 cows. Noel used the feed rail for buffer feeding this autumn.

Picture nine

“The new collecting yard has knocked 20 minutes off milking time,” said Noel Griffin. “The yard is also cleaner.” The cost was approximately €40,000, he said. “This included €4,000 for base stone, €10,000 for concrete, €8,500 for steelwork, €10,500 for the two scrapers and €5,000 for labour.”

The steelwork was done by Precision Engineering.

Picture 10

Noel has cut his water heating bills by installing this air to water heat exchange unit, supplied by John Reynolds of Kereen Building Services.

“It compresses the air and takes out the heat that’s produced. I saw one in use in a piggery and had one installed in our house. It halved our use of heating oil. Last year, I was looking at my bills for heating water in the parlour – we run an autowasher. I had a bill of about €4,500 for 300 days. I installed the unit and, now, the electricity cost is about €1,300 per year. It also heats a few radiators around the parlour and dairy.

“The price of the unit installed was €10,000, including VAT. I got back €2,000 worth of VAT and I got a grant of €2,000, leaving the net cost at €6,000. So, the unit pays for itself in two or three years.”