With much of the heavy lifting of dairy expansion completed over the last decade, milking equipment suppliers have seen recent farmer investments centre on efficiency as labour constraints tighten.

The middle of 2025 through to the end of the year has been very busy for milk equipment suppliers. Farmers are still investing, according to Lloyd Pearson of Pearson Milking Technology.

“They’re putting money in to equipment that can help with efficiency on the farm. They’re adding equipment on to their existing machines to make life easier. You need the machinery to do more work because you can’t get labour,” he said.

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Workers from south Asia have filled some labour gaps, but this can result in errors due to communication issues.

“To reduce this, farmers are investing in simple systems where the information can feed directly back from the person milking the cows to the farm manager or farmer.”

When it comes to areas of investment for dairy farmers, the overriding trend has been around labour shortages, said Brian O’Riordan of Lely.

Robots

“There’s a focus on efficiency too. We’re seeing that in the milking robot segment, I suppose that’s what robots bring to you,” O’Riordan said.

“Whatever time you had cupping on cows every day, we give you that time back.

“Scraping and cleaning robots have been popular sellers too as the labour shortage hits more and more yards.”

While robots have gained popularity, there are customers there for all types of parlour, said Alan Sexton of DeLaval.

“A farmer with 150 cows might go with two robots now, there’s a share of them putting in three.

“For the customers on 200 cows, if there’s a young fella in the yard, they’re choosing rotaries now instead of walking down pits, but you still have the fellas looking for 16- 20-unit parlours.

“A big factor going forward is the age profile of farmers and the milk price too.”

Sexton has seen big changes since he started working in parlours in the mid-90s.

“When I started first, a vice grips, a lump hammer, and a chisel would get you out of most corners and nowadays it’s laptops and iPads.

“ The technological side has come on leaps and bounds. It’s all about trying to make things easier and faster for our farmers.”

Dairymaster’s Pat Ryan has seen farmers’ demands evolve since 2015.

“In the last two to three years, the thing has changed slightly. We’ve done a lot of upgrades and add-ons, the likes of cluster removers or the cluster flush systems to improve milk quality. Heat detection has been popular too.”

Where options are limited farmers are opting for double-up parlours.

“That’s usually in cases where space is limited within a yard and they may not be able to go back or forward with parlour, so that’s an option some are taking to get extra throughput without having to do new builds.”