"Dairy farming has a very bright future because we have all this technology available to us which is helping us to do our jobs more efficiently."

In Tagori, Tasmania (Australia) Finalysons family installed 4 Lely Astronaut A5 on their farm to cope up with the ongoing labour issue and to increase the herd productivity. Thanks to Automatic milking system, Hugh Finlaysons along with his parents Alison and James Finlaysons is currently managing the farm by themselves. As per their experience, this system is the most cost-effective way of dairy farming. 

Producing milk in cost-effective way
"People want food they don't want to keep paying more money for food we've got to find ways of producing food more cheaply so this is one of the ways that we can we can to do that by using the technology." - James Finlaysons

Reason for choosing AMS
Finlayson family choosed AMS as they had long labor issue on the property for their old sheds where they were milking 600 plus cows spending up to five hours of milking. So they were spending 10 hours a day on the shed. In this system they are doing everything by themselves so now they are not worried about labour.

Increase in Production
Immediately after transition from conventional milking system to AMS, they had 10 % gain in the milk yield with the same cows. They have dried off a few cows and are expecting to see a further increase in the production with full season.

Information from T4C
Hugh Finlayson says "T4C pretty user-friendly program to use some of the main things we follow are our milkings per cow per day and of course our production per day. Just the amount of information we can get from T4C is great, not only on a cow level but on a robot level as well if we've got issues with robots we can quite often take it through the program itself."

Lely Center support
Accounding to Hugh Finlaysons "Lely centers been a great support both prior and during start-up, they actually provided a number of people here for the first three days to help get the cows used to the system which was a great help." With the Lely system early on we did have a few little bugs in the system which you expect at startup mainly and that was a good thing we had technicians around and any issues we did have were a good learning process we were here to see what was happening so later on the things went wrong in here we knew how to deal with it so wasn't such a big deal– Hugh Finlayson.