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The design of handling units is a weak point on dairy farms. There’s loads of thought put into milking parlours and cubicle houses, but the handling unit gets less attention.
Noel Byrne is an animal health technician based in Moorepark. He has carried out blood sampling and body condition scoring on thousands of cows on farms over the course of his career.
Noel’s brief was to design a handling unit for a new milking parlour and to also integrate a handling unit into an existing parlour, where cow flow is not as good.
Drafting gate
“I think the first thing to say is that an automatic drafting gate is nearly a certainty in this day and age so I think they should be factored into every design. In terms of the new build, I would like to see cows exit the parlour straight out the front. There should be enough space at the front of the parlour to hold all the cows from that row, so if cows are slow to walk through the drafter it won’t affect the speed of exit from the parlour,” Noel said.
His preferred design involved having the drafting gate in the centre of the yard with cows funnelled towards it. The drafting gate is connected to the crush. Cows are drafted to a holding pen which is then connected to a herringbone crush or AI race
Space
Noel stressed the importance of space in this holding area as cows that are drafted will gather in the furthest away section. This should be at least 20 feet away from the drafting gate.
Noel placed the hoof paring crush in the holding area, but at the side nearest the drafting gate because he said this was “dead area”.
Existing parlours
When it came to the existing milking parlour, he said his preference was to have the same design but facing the other way.
“The key thing is to make sure that cows can leave the yard straight away. On a lot of farms I go to, cows need to be held after milking because there’s not enough space in the collecting yard or because they are being routed back through the yard again. A bigger collecting yard or a new roadway can often make a huge difference to cow flow,” Noel said.
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