Twelve Lely A5 Astronauts start up within five months on one Dairy XL farm in Somerset

One year on from the first of twelve Lely A5 Astronaut milking robots being switched on at Huntham Farm, we visit multi-generational dairy farm manager Ben Hembrow to find out how he has found the past 12 months.

Before the first six robots were installed in July 2023, Huntham Farm in Stoke St Gregory, Somerset were milking 850 cows for 21 hours a day, three times a day through their 20-year-old 20:40 herringbone parlour. Although Ben confirms that he has always had a great team, he realised that there were potential labour shortages on the horizon and wanted to protect the future of the business by cutting out the ongoing need to recruit and retain staff to milk cows. Milking robots seemed like a sensible next step and having seen many robotic systems over the years he had an idea of how they could fit into the existing sheds. He decided to go with Lely because of the backup service support available and its excellent reputation for reliability.

Huntham Farm are now successfully running twelve Lely A5 Astronauts, three Discovery Collectors and three Lely Juno feed pushers. Cows average 3.3 robot visits a day which has resulted in an average milk yield increase of 22%, up to 40kg per day, as opposed to an average of 32kg prior to robots, which Ben is very pleased with.

Pictured: Ben Hembrow and wife and business partner Hollie Hembrow before their final robot start up

Labour

Prior to the robots, a lot of management time was spent managing milking protocol compliance. Now, time is spent managing fetch lists and while Ben oversees each member of staff’s section, whether its AI, foot trimming, feeding or robot maintenance and cleaning as well as ongoing project management.

Ben says that there are two clear positives of the new system; job satisfaction has increased, with flexibility enabled by the new system being a huge advantage in terms of working hours; and the labour efficiency of producing milk has dramatically improved.

“To quantify that, we have four full time labour equivalents less than before with improved job satisfaction” says Ben, who calculated that four full time staff less and a 20% increase in milk equates to 1.7 pence per litre saving in labour. The robots have enabled him to cut down from 10 full time staff members to 6, with a combination of part time employees who make up 1 and a half full time equivalents plus two and a half labour units of family labour from himself, wife Hollie and father John.

All of the current staff are still the original staff who were at Huntham before the robots which Ben thinks is largely down to them being the right age and mentality to realise the benefit of having robots and embrace the transition. “All of our staff have said that they would never go back to milking in a parlour out of choice”.

“Each and every full time member of staff were here before robots and they will all tell me how much better their job satisfaction is post robot installation.”

As a result of cutting down labour units, the Hembrow’s have recently sold a house in the village which they bought three years ago to accommodate two members of staff. Ben says it became surplus to requirements throughout the process and selling it was a clear indicator of those hidden labour costs that were associated to the old parlour based system.

Cow Health

Ben and the team admit that they have been surprised at how well the cows have adapted to the robots and have settled so quickly. “The cows have always been quiet, but you can still observe a noticeable change to their behavior and it’s a much more relaxing environment to work in. They are not herded around anymore so they are a lot calmer” says Ben.

Health alerts from the rumination collars have proved valuable in identifying earlier indication of health events which enables the team at Huntham Farm to administer an anti-inflammatory before the introduction of an antibiotic treatment. This has resulted in noticeable reduced use of antibiotics.

The heat detection collars have also allowed Ben to step away from a double off sync program to natural heat detection which not only has maintained a pregnancy rate of 28-30% but has a cost saving of around £20/cow, not to mention the reduction of labour and improved simplicity which is a huge saving that Ben is extremely happy with.

Foot health and lameness has also noticeably improved with the hoof trimmer observing less sole bruising and white line infections than previously. Ben believes that this is largely down to less standing time in collecting yards and less herding.

Future plans

There are plans in the pipeline for further robots to be installed within the next 12 months at Huntham Farm as there are still cows being milked in the parlour. Ben says that switching the parlour off will make the biggest difference to labour saving because there will no longer be that fixed time nature of milking and it will relieve the staff who are still fairly tied to the milking parlour and feeding times.

Having experienced multiple robot start-ups and different shed layouts, the next four robots have been given a lot of consideration in terms of design and ease of management with the help of Lely Center Yeovil’s Project Co-ordinator Alistair Cumings.

“A continuous challenge that we face is training heifers as we’re calving 20-30 heifers a month. Learning from our other robot layouts, we are designing the next few robots to have smaller groups of cubicles and segregation gates so we can fetch them easily three times a day from the start which improves their lactation going forward. It is a benefit of scale that we can have a designated fresh heifer robot and another for all treatment and fetch cows. We believe having all attention cows in one place will improve efficiencies and save labour and time walking between sheds” says Ben.

All in all, despite facing multiple challenges along the way, Ben says that he has been happy all the way through the process and is really pleased with how things are going at Huntham Farm.

Farm Facts

• Family-owned farm Stoke St Gregory, Somerset
• Farm Manager Ben Hembrow in business with wife Hollie and father John.
• Currently 12 Lely A5 Astronauts, 3 Lely Discovery Collectors and 3 Junos
• 850 milking cows, mostly Holstein Friesian with some Jersey cross Holsteins coming through
• Cows average 3.3 robot visits a day
• Average milk yield 40kg
• Current components 4.1% fat 3.6% protein