Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
your milking equipment when you purchase your land. The dairy market has been depressed,
so it is possible to buy good used equipment at big sales when a dairy goes out of production.
Milking parlor types
If you are milking a small number of cows, you may be able to start out with a couple of
homemade stalls and a portable milking machine. If you are buying an existing dairy barn,
you could use the existing equipment or install new, more efficient equipment in old areas.
Old dairy barns often use stanchions, or tie-stalls, to hold animals during milking. In a
bucket
system
, vacuum tubes pump milk into a small bucket, and the milk is poured from the bucket
into a holding container. In these systems, the operator is on level ground with the cows, so
you have to bend to attach the teat cups of the milking machine. If you use a bucket system,
you must also bend and lift to carry the bucket to the holding tank, or you can pour the milk
through a filter directly into bottles. Pipeline systems pump milk from the milker to a holding
area, eliminating the buckets and the need to carry them, but the farmer must still bend to at-
tach the teat cups to the cow. These systems are labor-intensive but can be effective for small-
scale farmers. Some stores specialize in equipment for small dairies, such as Family Milk
Cow Dairy Supply Store (
www.familymilkcow.com
)
, which offers such equipment as milk-
ing machines and cheesemaking tools.
Newer dairy systems rely on milking parlors to reduce bending and lifting by elevating the
cows above the milker, who stands in an area called the operator pit. This also cuts milking
time and leaves time for other management tasks. The smallest dairies may not find these sys-
tems cost effective — just 22 percent of small organic dairies that had 50 cows or fewer use
them, according to the USDA. But nearly all organic dairies with 200 cows or more use them.
Many farmers will update existing barns with newer parlors. Some parlors are more basic
than others. In most milking systems, the herd, or a portion of the herd, is walked to the parlor
and held in a holding pen before each milking. Cattle wait behind a crowd gate for a stall to
open.
Here is a list of milk parlor types:
•
Herringbone parlor
: Cows stand side-by-side, angled toward the operator pit. Milking
clusters canbeattached totheteats fromthesideofthecow,whichmakesiteasier tosee
and clean front udders.