Quarter Individual Milking in Conventional Milking Parlours

In this study, a new quarter individual milking system called Multilactor® (MULTI) was compared with a conventional milking system (CON). The target of the developments in the field of milking technique is to obtain the whole milk from the teat of the animal in the shortest possible time without causing any detrimental effect on udder health. The most direct measure of the milking system effect on the cow is the vacuum in the claw of the milking unit (Reinemann et al. 2007). The quarter individual milking is still introduced by automatic milking systems (AMS). There are many studies about the effects of AMS milking on udder health conducted by different scientists. Rasmussen et al. (2003) detected an increase in bulk-milk somatic cell count (SCC) after using of AMS. This shows the necessity of having an additional method to detect clinically infected cows. So measuring of milk composition especially SCC per each udder quarter is important (Berglund et al. 2007). To satisfy these needs, a new milking system called “Multilactor®” was developed. Multilactor® uses the single tube system like AMS. But these systems include periodic air inlet in pulse chamber (like BioMilker®) and can be adapted for the use at milking parlour. It has a sequential pulsation and cluster is adapted by milking person (Oz et al. 2008). The objective of this study was to determine the effects of milk flow on average liner vacuum at the teat end during band d-phase in both, conventional and quarter individual milking systems by using wet-test method in practical conditions as defined in (ISO 6690, 2007).