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Farmers in the west are investing in precision dairying technologies to save on time and labour, with farmers with over 100 cows more likely to invest in the technology, a new research project has found.
John Conroy, a UCD/Teagasc masters student, presented the findings of his project An Investigation into dairy farmers’ perceptions of precision dairying and the factors affecting adoption in the west of Ireland on Friday at a Knowledge Transfer (KT) conference.
He focused on four precision dairying technologies for his project: automatic cluster removers, automatic drafting, automatic heat detection and automatic calf feeders.
Participants
Seventy-five farmers in five dairy discussion groups in the west took part in the project.
Half of the farmers surveyed had none of the four technologies. Twenty-three of them had automatic cluster removal on their farms and 12 of them had automatic drafting. Farmers with more than 100 cows were more likely to invest.
Five had automatic heat detection and five had automatic calf feeders.
Some 26.7% of farmers said they invested in the technology to save time and labour
Conroy’s study found that farmers ranked automatic cluster removal and automatic drafting as the most beneficial to their farms.
Some 26.7% of farmers said they invested in the technology to save time and labour, while 20% said they did so in order not to over-milk cows.
Some 16.7% also said that they invested to manage big numbers efficiently, 13.3% said they invested for heat detection and health and 6.7% invested for safety reasons.
Reasons for not investing
On the flip side, the farmers surveyed also gave their reasons for not investing in precision technology, with 25.6% saying they didn’t need it, 23.1% said they were investing in other areas (such as land) and 10.3% said the technology was too expensive.
Just over 15% of farmers said their herd size was too small.
The factors which influenced farmers adopting the technologies included trust, cost and attracting people to work.
Age breakdown
The average age of the farmers in the survey was 45, average herd size was 117 head and the average milking platform was 39.3ha. The average stocking rate was 2.94 LU/ha.
Farmers aged between 31 to 40 and 41 to 50 had the highest uptake of the technologies.
Conroy said that while there has been a lot of research carried out in New Zealand and Australia, there is a limited knowledge of it in Ireland. He said there was scope to complete a similar survey at national level.
Dairying in the west
“Approximately 30% of the milk produced in Ireland originates from farms classified as heavy soils, predominantly located in the west of Ireland.
"High annual rainfall, combined with heavy clay soils, make trafficability a major problem in the west of Ireland in particular.
“Farm fragmentation is very common in the west and there are approximately 75,000 dairy cows in Connacht compared to Munster’s 864,000 and 390,000 in Leinster,” he said.
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