A portable flow simulator was developed for recording vacuum variations in commercial milking machine clusters. The cluster in the milking unit under evaluation was mounted on the frame of the simulator and the flow of water through each liner was regulated by separate flow meters. By placing an artificial teat into the liners the flow characteristics during actual milking were simulated. Measu...

The aim of this study was to detect incidence of mastitis in an automatic milking system using serial information. Data from 112,000 milkings of the research dairy herd Karkendamm of the University of Kiel were available. The incidence of mastitis was defined both on therapies carried out and on weekly somatic cell count measurements. The time series of electric conductivity of quarter milk wer...

In conventional milking systems, dairy cows are driven to the milking stall twice or thrice daily, whereas in automatic milking systems (AMS), the cows enter the milking stall voluntarily. In this study, noninvasive methods were used to analyze the physiological reaction of 17 cows toward the changeover from conventional to automatic milking. Milk yield and composition were analyzed. Heart rate...

During recent years, there has been interest in once-a-day (OAD) milking. A comparison was made of OAD with twice-a-day (TAD) milking on a case study farm in northern Victoria. The comparison suggests that operating profit and internal rate of return are similar to TAD milking if the decrease in milk protein plus fat production, as a result of OAD milking, is less than 12 percent. Although a de...

The time constraints of the classic twice-daily milking routine are less easily endured by individual dairy farmers, because of their impact on quality of life. Our aim was to evaluate milk production responses by dairy cows milked twice daily at contrasting intervals. In experiments 1 (20 cows) and 2 (28 cows), four milking regimes were compared during a 3-week period beginning after the peak ...

The aim of this study was to investigate the action of opioids (the mu receptor agonist morphine) and the antagonist naloxone on inhibition of oxytocin release and milk let-down in response to milking in dairy cows. In the first experiment, cows were injected with 0, 21, 70 and 210 mg morphine 10 min before milking on four successive days. Plasma oxytocin levels after 1 min manual stimulation o...

Udder and teat morphology measurements were taken at approximately 7.5 hr after the a.m. milking for 131 East Friesian (EF) crossbred ewes at an average of 71 d in lactation. Additionally, milking time was recorded for each ewe during two evening and morning milkings. Average daily milk production, milking time, percentage of milk fat, percentage of milk protein, and somatic cell count were 2 L...

BACKGROUND The milk yield can be affected by the frequency of milking per day, in dairy cows. Previous studies have shown that the milk yield is increased by 6-25 % per lactation when the milking frequency is increased from 2 to 3 times per day while the somatic cell count is decreased. To investigate the effect of milking frequency (3X vs. 4X) on milk yield and it's genetic parameters in the f...

________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract Udder health considerably affects the economics of dairy farming. There are different reasons for poor udder health; one of them is the milking technique. In earlier studies it was shown that automatic milking systems (AMS) have advantages over conventional milking systems (CMS). Quarter individual milking...