As milking cows becomes the main job during the mid-season, farmers should review their milking start time and ensure that they are finishing up the day at a reasonable time.

Traditionally the 10-12-hour split used to be the only way of milking cows, and starting milking before 5:00p.m. was unheard of.

According to Teagasc, 75% of dairy farmers start evening milking after 5pmor . For many farmers, this is due to family arrangements and commitments and cannot be avoided, but for others, there is an opportunity to start earlier in the day.

A couple of questions farmers need to ask themselves are: Does time expand to fill the time available? Are inefficiencies occurring on the back of this? And is a 7:00p.m. or later finish time making dairy farming look unattractive?

The traditional owner-operator plus additional family help model is struggling on Irish dairy farms, with many herds having increased and reliant on outside labour.

The sustainability of dairy farming now relies on being able to hire workers on farms and relief milkers, but this cannot be done without providing employment opportunities where pay and conditions of work are at least as attractive as alternative careers.

Studies have shown that long working hours for farm employees can make the employment opportunities very unattractive.

Nearly every other industry provides a finish time of 5:00-6:00p.m, and the time employees finish their day's work was cited as a critical issue for many.

A fear for farmers starting milking earlier in the evening is the work they miss out on or work that does not get done, but for farmers who made the switch to a 4:00p.m. start time say that time does expand to fill the amount available.

In fact, according to Teagasc, many farmers were hanging around waiting for milking time. Research shows that there is very little change in milking time per season, proving that it is a habit/tradition on most farms.

One of the biggest fear for farmers moving from the traditional milking interval to a 16:8 milking interval is the drop in milk production and performance, but studies have shown that this is not the case.

A 16:8 milking interval is typically a 7:00a.m morning start and a 3:00pm evening start and ensures that the main job on the farm is wrapped up before 5:00-6:00p.m.

A Teagasc study analysed milk recording data from 2,366 herds across 23 counties over a one-year period (2020).

The study showed that across all herds, the mean evening milking finish time was 6:43p.m and the length of the working day was nearly 12 hours, with huge variation seen as the working day ranged from 8.5 hours to 16.4 hours.

The milking interval is defined as the time from when the first cluster goes on in the morning to the time the first cluster goes on again that evening.

In order to reduce the amount of hours worked a day, it has been shown that a 16:8 milking interval is feasible, which would see a farmers putting clusters on at 7:00a.m and again that evening at 3:00p.m.

The data collected on commercial herds for the study showed that there was no relationship between milking interval and daily milk yield, with no change seen in somatic cell count (SCC).

Although, a lot of the time it can be difficult early in the evenings, especially at busy times of the year when cows are calving down and calves have to be fed, so there should be some effort to reduce your working hours.

Even if it is difficult to implement a 16:8 milking interval during the busy spring time, farmers should see whether it is possible to introduce it later on in the year to reduce the workload and make your farm a more attractive place to work.

If your milking interval is not going to affect your milk solid production, your cow performance and your SCC, then it is certainly a no brainer to try and finish up a bit earlier in the evenings.

Now is a great time to even try and get started a half an hour earlier than usual and there is nothing stopping you from going back out on the farm to finish off jobs after that, once the milking is done.