John Horan milks 200 cows alongside his wife, Carmel, and son, Shane, in south Tipperary.
John hails from a dairy farming family, and decided to purchase the Horan’s current 240ac farm in the 90s. In 2000, the family decided to start dairying.
Originally, John had installed a conventional milking parlour on his farm, however after some time he decided to explore other milking system options.
Before installing any new milking systems on the farm, he carried out some research into the various milking systems to figure out which system would suit his herd best.
Robotic milking
During a trip to the Netherlands, John was introduced to a Lely A4 Astronaut robotic milking system on a Dutch dairy farm.
Since then, the Horans have installed three A4 Lely Astronaut milking robots on their farm.
Speaking about how farming has changed for him since installing the robots, John said: “Since we’ve changed from our conventional milking parlour to robots, the cows have settled and I have to say, we definitely get more milk in the tank.
“I’ve all the information I need. I have the protein, I have the fat, I have the somatic cell count, and I’ve the milk speed.
“The information I have on my cows is unreal. Now going forward, I’m breeding to the best of my cows, which I have to say is absolutely super.
“Through the information on the robots we culled all the slow cows, the low-yielding cows, and even at that we were up 40,000L on last year.”
Minimal changes to infrastructure
Changing parlours can be daunting, especially when farmers feel like they need to transform their farm to suit a robotic milking system.
However, John disagrees with this, as he says that he made minimal infrastructure changes on his farm for the robots.
“So, shed-wise we hadn’t a whole lot to do in the building,” John explained.
“I did build cubicles, which I was going to do anyway. So I wouldn’t count that as any extra work with the robots.
“We had roadways running through the farm, but we’d small little tees to put in here and there and we had to put one roadway beside another one to kind of make it a dual carriageway for cows passing.
“Our milking facilities are in the centre of our farm, but you could work with whatever farm you have,” he said.
Getting started with robotic milking
In 2017, the Horans started up their three Lely Astronaut robots on 150 cows. While the Horans have an easier life now, getting started took time.
“I won’t tell anyone was easy. It was actually hard work to be truthful about it – but that was our start-up experience,” John said.
Once the Horans got the hang of things, it was plain sailing from then on.
“Then every year in January and February, when your cows start calving, all you have is your heifers to look after,” John added.
“The cows will automatically come back in and get going once they’re trained from the year before,” said John.
More free-time
In the video above, John ran through his daily routine with the Lely robots. He said: “My daily routine is that we get-up in the morning, we check the collect cow list, just check is there any cows that are long hours or anything needs to be just checked on.
“We wash the robots. Then I would go up to section B of the farm and I would move on the wire where the cows will be moving out to.
“You wash the robots morning and evening and clean the lasers, which is important to do.”
Before installing his Lely robots, John spent hours in the parlour, but these hours have now been freed up, allowing John to allocate time to different jobs on the farm.
“I find with the robots we’re able to do an awful lot of different work on the farm, which I wasn’t able to do before.
“We do all our own machinery work on this from hedge cutting, fencing, slurry, fertiliser.
“We even do our own silage, so we’re able to do all this because of the robots,” said John.
John warns that while the robots may free up more time for farmers, they shouldn’t be completely reliant on them.
“What I wouldn’t advise for anyone to put in robots and think that you can get into your car and go off down to the seaside and forget about things. That doesn’t work,” he said.
Improving farm sustainability
John is doing his part in improving his carbon footprint by increasing the sustainability of his farm. He has sown multi-species grass swards containing clover, which reduce his reliance on nitrogen fertiliser, and he also has future plans to install solar panels on his sheds.
Discussing how he is doing his bit for the environment, John said: “So in this field at the minute, it is a multi-species sward. There is two grass mixtures in it. There is two clover mixtures in it. There is red clover in it, there is plantain and chicory.
“You don’t actually put fertiliser out on this. The reason why we have this on the farm [is] we’re trying it out. It cuts out fertiliser which is good for the environment.
“So the future plan on this farm is we’re going installing solar panels. They will work very well with robotics because we are generating electricity and we’re using this at the same time during the day.
“The robots are using electricity 24 hours/day. So they’re using it in the daytime. So we would hope to save between 30-35% of our ESB bill by going solar.”
However, the most important feature of the Lely robots for John is that he now has more free time to spend with his family, which makes his farming life more enjoyable.
“I find now on a Sunday we can go off and we don’t have to come back and milk cows which is a great bonus for us,” he said.
For further information on Lely’s robots, click here.
