THE FIRST championship' at AgriScot, this week, went to a new innovation which should help dairy farmers cut down on mastitis spread between cows in the parlour.

The Greenoak Airwash system won first place in the AgriScot/The Scottish Farmer innovation award at the show, at Ingliston, this week.

The product is aimed at sterilising each individual liner on the milking cluster between cows, so that cross-infection via the liners as a vector is avoided. It can be installed into existing milking parlours, without changing liners or clusters and costs up to £500 per milking point.

This machine is imported from Holland - where it has been a runaway success in reducing cell counts and cases of mastitis - by Greenoak Equipment, from Cheshire. It works by using pulses of air to flush a mixture of water and peracetic acid through the inside of milking liners. The system uses just 400ml of water for each wash, per cluster.

Operation is completely automatic - in the case of doublesided parlours, the Airwash system is activated by the exit gate switch, while on swing-over units, the automatic cluster removal system, with a time lapse to cater for accidental knocks-offs, kicks the system in.

According to Greenoak's Mike Watson, even without the addition of chemical, some 95% of harmful bacteria is flushed out of the liner, by simply using water on its own.

Each unit has its own Dosatron control box to measure the dose of peracetic acid into the water stream, via a Y-junction which is fitted into the hose from the liner. Each cycle only lasts 20-30 seconds, so the operation does not hinder milking times.

Second place in the competition was taken by a robot feeder which is claimed to significantly increase milk yield by the simple act of sweeping up silage to the feed barrier and placing a trickle of concentrate feeding on top.

The Butler' robot feeder was designed by an Austrian farmer and is being sold in the UK through Wasserbauer UK, of Leamington Spa, which is the UK importer for the totally automatic system made by Austrian firm, Wasserbauer.

The robot is attached to a rail which runs alongside the feeding barrier and can be pre-set to sweep up, and deliver its feed load as many times a day as required.

The system is aimed at continually keeping cows interested in the feed in front of them and on-farm results from the continent suggest that by removing some concentrates from the TMR mixture and feeding them through the Butler feeder, does not impact on feed costs. It does, however, mean that the cows graze' their feed more often and this, in turn, improves dry matter intake, which is often a limiting factor for very high yielding cows.

At the end of each cycle, the robot docks itself to recharge its batteries and automatically tops itself up from a feed hopper. It can also be primed to sweep up and not deliver concentrates every time.

The system costs roughly £125-£135 per cow to put in place. But, the results of independent trials carried out by Austrian research workers showed that the intake of dry matter from bulk feeds per cow increased by 1.6kg per day, when concentrates were delivered by the Butler, while the average milk yield rose by 2.4kg per day or 720kg per year.

Keith and John Jamieson, from Woodhead, Annan, have been sufficiently impressed to become one of the first herds in the UK to install the robot.

* The AgriScot innovations award was judged by Fife dairy farmer, Colin Telfer; Aberdeenshire farmer, Robert Maitland; and The SF's deputy editor, Ken Fletcher.

11:56am Friday 21st November 2008

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