The Almost Perfect Parlor

There was an old Saturday Night Live skit that stated “you can’t put too much water in a nuclear reactor.” The people in the skit argued as to if that meant you can’t actually get to a point where the water level is too high or if it meant that getting it too high would cause a failure.

On many parlors today we have reached a point of you can’t use too much water. The dilemma has reached such proportions that some have chosen to just shut it off entirely to prevent problems caused by wet and dirty conditions. As with most problem solving let’s start back at the fundamentals. [Read more…]

Recent travels have taken me to places I don’t usually visit. Good news is they have cows there too. One of the topics of discussion in these locations has been milking cows without detachers.
The real question isn’t can it be done, my 10 year old son CAN back the car out of the garage, the question is can it be done well as in the instance of if my 10 year old son backing my wife’s new car out of the garage, now we have a dilemma.
Automation was designed to either replace or enhance the manual process of milking cows. One of the most common reasons for purchasing automatic milking detachers was to deliver consistency. The concept was that every person judges milk flow a little differently and using them as the judge delivered varying outcomes, installing a detacher then would eliminate the variation from person to person delivering a consistent outcome day in and day out to the cow. [Read more…]

Much has been said about needing weight to milk the cow. From rocks to barn cleaner parts to whatever is within reach, different devices have been used to add weight to the cluster to improve milking performance. The question then is “Is weight needed to milk a cow?” The quick answer, unlike Bill Clinton referring to “What your definition of is is,” would be no. [Read more…]

Milking the cows or is it milking the cow? Many times over the years we have progressed beyond our ability to fully understand. In the instance of milking cows we now have the ability to milk hundreds of cows per hour on facilities large enough to truly be called small factories. The ability to remove large volumes of milk from cows is impressive, but like the superman quote goes “with great power comes great responsibility. [Read more…]

When people speak about checking over the milking system the real question becomes, what are they referring to as the system? Most times the reference is to the equipment tasked with removing the milk from the cows. The system used for removal of milk is unfortunately much more complicated than that. The system used to remove the milk from the cow truly includes much more than just the milking machines. The system includes the milking machine, the people using the machines, the cows, and the physical facility that all these moving parts work in. [Read more…]