Management by exception is how Lely T4C has been developed and merged with automatic milking. Healthy cows require less attention so you are able to focus on those that do need your help. To follow up on these cows you can allocate them to a certain manual group, such as ‘Milk 6 times a day’, or ‘Milk 99 times a day’, but is it wise to do this?
Management, T4C & InHerd, Milking
Allocating cows
It may be the case that you want a cow to visit the robot more often due to illness and a treatment. With the ‘Milk 6 times a day’ group, this is possible (figure 1); or, for example, the ‘Milk 2 times a day’ group.
Removing cows
Allocating cows to a certain manual group may be a very good choice for that particular moment in order to manage by exception; however, the group remains a manual group. This means that you also need to take the cow out again manually. Practical experience has taught us that farmers often forget to remove these cows from the manual groups again, with all of the possible consequences.
Therefore, in the first place we advise working as much as possible with automatic groups. However, when working with manual groups, check once a week whether the cows allocated to these groups still need to be in them, or if they can be moved to their automatic group again.
Lely Farm Management Support
