Keeping cows clean with the investment of Lely Discovery 90S has brought many benefits for the Baillie family, Crumhaugh,Over Dalserf, Ashgill, South Lanarkshire, Scotland.

Jimmie, Isabel, James and Gavin, manage their 255-cow milking herd which are housed all-year round being milked twice a day and are fed a full TMR diet with no additional feeding.

The herd will be averaging 10,700 litres, 4.2% fat and 3.4% protein, with a calving interval of 380 days. The past few years, the cows at Crumhaugh have been having issues with digital dermatitis.

“We had looked at several factors, including changing our footbath routines, changing the products we were using but we were still having too many cases of digital dermatitis. The passages were being scraped once a day when the sawdust bedder was bedding the cubicles. With the passages only being scraped once a day, we knew the main problem was the cows’ feet were too dirty and the passages needed scraped more often," explained Gavin, with the family being the main workforce this was playing a factor in the labour required to be able to scrape the passages more.

The Baillie family new they had to do something, so made the decision to invest in a ‘Lely Discovery 90S’.

The Lely Discovery is an automatic manure scraper for hard and slatted flooring in agricultural buildings. The robot can be programmed to work 24/7 to ensure that the passages are scraped to ensure the cows feet remain clean which in turn promotes foot and udder health.

“The cows were significantly cleaner within the first week of the Discovery being installed. The beds were so much cleaner too. The cows adapted well to the install; within half a day, they were used to the robot moving around the shed scraping the passages," said Gavin, who only installed the scraper four months ago.

Since using the Lely Discovery cellcount has reduced dramatically from a 120 average down to an average of 98. Although this was not the main priority for Gavin, it proves the Lely Discovery is playing a major factor in this decrease.

The Lely Discovery has two routes that it completes within the sheds at Crumhaugh. It completes the main passages every two hours and the remainder of the passages are completed when the cows are out the shed in the milking parlour. It can be programmed to do more routes when they are required.