Dairy unlike any udder

By Lachlan Ellis

Moorabool’s not really known as a dairy farming region, but one local farm is producing over 100,000 litres of milk a week, and they don’t do it by hand.
Ron and Heather Trigg run the largest free-standing barn come dairy farm in Moorabool, milking around 400 Friesian cows with robots on their Bungaree property.
The cows are milked three times a day with the DeLaval milking machines, once every eight hours, and wander into a milking machine on their own when they feel they need to be milked – Mr Trigg calls them “creatures of habit”.
A microchip in each cow is read by the machine to check whether the cow requires milking – if not, the exit door automatically opens, and the cow returns to the feeding area. If it does need to be milked, laser lights line up its teats, wash them, and then attach suction cups to milk the cow.
A screen on each machine shows the yields of each cow, how many litres from the prior milking to current.
Mr Trigg said he and his wife have been dairy farmers “all our lives”, and though the machines had removed some of the physical work from running the farm, he still is up at 5 am, 7 days a week.
“We’ve had this running for five years…farmers in Australia and New Zealand don’t tend to milk this way because we’ve got green grass, and that’s the cheapest way to produce milk. But in this district where we’re so wet and cold in winter time, this system is ideal for us,” Mr Trigg told the Moorabool News.
“The cows produce more being milked three times a day than the traditional two, it takes pressure off them with getting mastitis.”
A tractor drops feed silage at either side of the barn twice a day – Mr Trigg says the farm goes through “20 tonnes of the stuff” every single day, with each cow producing 60 – 80 litres of milk daily.
On average, the farm produces around 15,000 litres of milk per day. If there are any issues with the machines, Mr Trigg gets a notification on his phone. Detailed statistics on the cows and their milk can also be viewed on his computer.
Automated scrapers push the cows’ manure to one end of the huge barn, where it’s used as fertiliser on the paddocks. The farm grows all the feed for the cows on the 1000-acre property.
It’s also hoped that in the future, methane gas created from the manure by a ‘biodigester’ can be used to partially power the farm, saving the Triggs thousands of dollars a year.
The milk from the farm is trucked to Melbourne and Warrnambool.