Tom and Stephanie Stack, Co. Cork

The Lely Astronaut A5 is the new milestone in milking. It's an evolution that incorporates everything we have learnt over the past 25 years since we invented automatic milking. We looked at our cows, we listened to our customers and we stuck to proven practices, but we also completely redesigned every bit of the system.

Tom and Stephanie Stack were interested in the Lely Astronaut having had a conventional milking parlour for decades. But before making the change they wanted to know more about how it can help bring effieciences to their farm.

Read below their account of how they choose the Lely Astronaut.

Tom and Stephanie's road to making a decision to go with the Lely Astronaut tstarted with a trip to the Netherlands. "After a trip to Holland in 2017 our eyes were really opened to the possibilities with robotic milking. The face that it was working so successfully and that we met two farmers with robots who were working off farm."

Tom adds: "After chatting with them we could realate to how they were managing the farm and also working off farm full time. We then went to an opden fay and visiteed a faw farmers locally and we saw that itdefinatly work on a grass based system." 

Having invested in the Lely Astronaut automatic milking system we asked Tom and Stephanie what is one the key functionailities it has bought to the farm: "The flexibility of the whole system and labour saving was key."