Power and water consumption of automatic milking systems

The Danish Advisory Center for cattle (Dansk Kvæg) made a farm test of the power and water consumption of five of the most recent AMS systems on the market.

The test showed a difference of 250 DKK (around 45 USD or 34 Euro) per cow and year between the different AMS systems.

The automatic milking systems need to be correctly calibrated and maintained, to avoid increased costs of power and energy, but the largest cost savings can be achieved through a maximum utilization of the system’s capacity.

This can be done by fulfilling the following criteria:
High milk flow
High yield
Relatively low number of milkings
Controlled cow traffic, to avoid rejections
Good visiting frequency to the AMS

Important factors to fulfill these parameters are e.g breeding, feeding and farm management. The more kg of milk that run through the robot every 24 hours, the better the economy of the power and water consumption.

The FarmTest group recommends AMS users to install electricity and water meters, to be able to continuously check consumption and control costs.

Read the whole study on power and energy consumption of AMS (download pdf)