At a recent webinar organised by the Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC) on alternative milking, Brent Boyce, an LIC consultant based in New Zealand, said that farmers who practice flexible milking can reduce the amount of time spent milking by 15 days a year compared to twice-a-day milking.

He said that a twice-a-day milking generally involves 608 milkings per year and once-a-day milking can halve this to 304 milkings.

His data suggests that a twice-a-day milking takes three hours, which is likely slightly longer than a typical milking in Ireland due to differences in herd size.

Adopting a flexible milking approach is likely to increase the time at each milking, because more milk will be harvested.

Brent suggests that farmers who use 10-in-7 can produce the same amount of milk as they do milking twice a day

However, in a full season once-a-day (OAD) system, 32 work days can be saved compared to twice-a-day milking.

Brent has been working in the area of flexible milking for over 20 years and was one of the first to come up with the 3-in-2 milking system, where the herd is milked three times every two days – close to a 16 hour milking interval.

10-in-7

One of the issues he has encountered with this approach is that it is not very weekend friendly. As a result, he has since come up with the 10-in-7 approach, which involves milking the herd 10 times in seven days.

This approach works on a weekly basis and involves one milking every Saturday and Sunday and one milking every Tuesday and Thursday.

The other days, the cows are milked twice a day as normal. While this approach reduces work at the weekends, it has also been found to reduce the impact of milk loss and Brent suggests that farmers who use 10-in-7 can produce the same amount of milk as they do milking twice a day.

Adopting a flexible approach to milking - milking the herd OAD for the first three weeks of February (in Ireland), then milking twice a day up to the fourth week of June, before then going to 10-in-7 from the last week of June to third week of October and then going back on OAD milking until dry-off - will reduce the amount of days spent milking by 15 and, according to Brent, have little to no impact on lactation yield compared to twice-a-day milking.

Downsides

“There are some downsides with 10-in-7. If you’ve got a herd with a history of staph aureus infection, then stay on 3-in-2 milkings or twice-a-day milking. That Saturday and Sunday [OAD] milkings seems to get staph going in the herd if you have a history of it,” Brent says.

However, he adds that SCC is usually not an issue on most farms that practice flexible milking and don’t have a staph problem.

In terms of profitability, he says that farmers who practice flexible milking generally have lower costs and similar or better production compared to a full season of twice-a-day milking, but that more recording of profit on these farms is required for more detailed analysis.