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...

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...

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 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...

________________________________________________________________________________ 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...