Effect of transitioning to automatic milking systems on producers' perceptions of farm management and cow health in the Canadian dairy industry

INTRODUCTION

When functioning optimally, an automatic milking system (AMS) permits cows to voluntarily visit a robotic milking unit multiple times per day to be milked without requiring human labor. Demonstrated benefits of AMS include increased milk production, improved cow comfort, a more flexible lifestyle for producers, less labor for milking, as well as improved cow health and more interesting or less routine activities for the producer. However, an AMS has higher capital costs, requires producers to be on-call, and changes management to be more data-based. Profitability or labor savings with AMS varies depending on the management capabilities of producers.

Although Europe has the highest concentration of AMS dairy farms, this technology is becoming increasingly common in Canada. The proportion of dairy farms in Canada that use AMS has grown from 5.6% in 2014 to 6.8% in 2015. Despite this growing popularity, little documentation exists on how AMS has affected North American farms as a whole (inclusive of cow health, milk parameters, management, housing, and dairy producers).

Several AMS survey studies have been published, but many of these are non-Canadian studies that focus on a very specific aspect of dairy farming. The Canadian dairy industry is different from that of the United States and European Union in average herd size, milk price, and animal welfare standards, suggesting that AMS studies conducted abroad may not necessarily be reflective of the Canadian dairy industry. Furthermore, few published AMS studies focus on producers' perceptions of change with the transition to AMS and comprehensively describe the effects of adopting AMS on farms.

The objective of our study was to determine how producers perceive the transition to AMS in terms of resulting changes in housing, farm management, and cow health. Other topics addressed in the survey, as described below, will be reported in additional publications.

Farm Selection and Data Collection

Contact information for AMS producers was acquired through Alberta Milk (Edmonton, AB, Canada) and Dairy Farmers of Manitoba (Winnipeg, MB, Canada), which are provincial milk boards, as well as through Lely Canada (Woodstock, ON, Canada) and DeLaval Canada (Peterborough, ON, Canada). We obtained contact information for 530 Canadian AMS producers.