Automatic milking and grazing

TL;DRAbstract

Recent research on how to combine automatic milking (AM) systems and grazing is presented with the objective to summarise the results obtained in an EU-project and discuss these results in relation to present knowledge in the field. Experiments with 24-hour grazing conducted in Sweden showed no difference in water intake between cows with drinking water indoors, and cows with water both indoors and on pasture. Ad libitum supply of silage did not increase milk yield or lower the milking interval compared with 3 kg dry matter*cow*day-1. Free cow traffic (access to feed supplements) gave a significantly lower number of voluntary milkings compared with controlled access. Grazing near the barn (50m) gave a higher milk yield compared with grazing further away (260m). Dutch surveys and studies on AM-farms with grazing showed that selection gates contributed to a lower number of manually fetched animals. In an experiment, the effect of pasture distance (<150m versus > 500m) and supplementation

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