Dairy farming

Dairy farming could be a category of agricultural, or an animal farming enterprise, for long-term production of milk, which might be either processed on-the-spot or transported to a farm works for process and ultimate retail sale. Most dairy farms sell the male calves born by their cows, usually for meat production, or breeding depending on quality of the Bull calf, rather than raising non-milk-producing stock. Many farm farms conjointly grow their own feed, typically as well as corn, alfalfa, and hay. This is fed on to the cows, or is stored as feed for use throughout the winter season. Additional dietary supplements are additional to the feed to increase quality milk production.

About Dairy Farming

Dairy farming has been a part of agriculture for thousands of years, but traditionally, it was usually done on atiny low scale on mixed farms. Specialist scale dairy farm farming is merely viable wherever either an oversized quantity of milk is needed for production of additional sturdy dairy merchandise like cheese, or there is a considerable market of individuals with cash to shop for milk, but no cows of their own.

Centralized dairy farming as we tend to comprehend it primarily developed around villages and cities, where residents were unable to have cows of their own attributable to an absence of lea. Near the city, farmers could create some further cash on the facet by having further animals and commercialism the milk in city. The dairy farmers would fill barrels with milk in the morning and produce it to plug on a wagon.

Before mechanization most cows were still milked by hand. At milking time they brought the vacuum pump, and the automatic machine.
The first milking machines were AN extension of the standard milk pail. The early milker device work on prime of a daily milk pail and Sabbatum on the ground below the cow. Following each cow being milked, the bucket would be dumped into a holding tank.

This developed into the Surge hanging milker. Prior to milking a cow, a large wide animal skin strap referred to as a surcingle was place round the cow, across the cow's lower back. The milker device and assortment tank adorned  beneath the cow from the strap. This innovation allowed the cow to move around naturally during the milking method instead of having to square absolutely still over a bucket on the ground.

Surge later developed a vacuum milk-return system known as the Step-Saver, to save the farmer the difficulty of carrying the heavy steel buckets of milk all the approach back to the vessel within the milkhouse. The system used a very long vacuum hose volute around a receiver cart, and connected to a vacuum-breaker device in the milkhouse. Following milking each cow, the hanging milk bucket would be dumped into the receiver cart, which filtered detritus from the milk and allowed it to be slowly sucked through the long hose to the milkhouse. As the farmer milked the cows asynchronous, the cart would be rolled further down the center aisle, the long milk hose unwrapped from the cart, and hung on hooks on the ceiling of the aisle.

The next innovation in automatic milking was the milk pipeline. This uses a permanent milk-return pipe and a second vacuum pipe that encircles the barn or milking parlor above the rows of cows, with quick-seal entry ports above every cow. By eliminating the need for the milk instrumentation, the milking device shrank in size and weight to the point wherever it might suspend below the cow, held up solely by the suction force of the cows nipples on the cow's mamma. The milk is pulled up into the milk-return pipe by the vacuum system, and then flows by gravity to the milkhouse vacuum-breaker that puts the milk within the vessel. The pipeline system greatly reduced the physical labor of milking since the farmer no longer needed to hold around large significant buckets of milk from every cow.

History of milk preservation methods

Keeping milk cool helps preserve it. When windmills and well pumps were fancied, one of its first uses on the farm besides providing water for animals was for cooling milk, to extend the storage life before being transported to the town market. The naturally cold underground water would be continuously wired into a tub or different containers of milk set within the tub to cool down once milking. This method of milk cooling was extraordinarily widespread before the arrival of electricity and refrigeration.
When refrigeration 1st arrived, the equipment was fairly little and did not have the power to chop-chop cool the massive volume of milk that was getting into the vessel in an exceedingly short amount of your time. This problem was resolved through the development of the ice bank. This is a double-walled tank design wherever water and cooling coils fill the area beneath and round the milk tank on top of.
All day long, the small mechanical device and cooling system slowly attracts heat out of the water, while a second pump ceaselessly circulates the water around the coils. Ice eventually builds up around the coils, until it reaches a thickness of regarding 3 inches close every pipe, and the cooling system shuts off. When the milking operation starts solely the milk mischief-maker and also the water circulation pump processing water across the ice and the steel walls of the tank ar required to chop-chop cut back the incoming milk to a temperature below forty degrees. But as a result of the ice is not allowable to create up till it touches the milk vessel, the milk does not get cold enough to additionally freeze.

This cooling method worked well for smaller dairies up to regarding forty cows, but for giant numbers of animals a much better system was required to chop-chop cool the incoming heat milk. This is usually done employing a device referred to as a plate excitation, which is a device. Alternating stainless steel plates cause the milk to flow in an exceedingly skinny sheet across the plates, while cold water is circulated in a skinny sheet on the opposite aspect of the plates. Flattening out the milk flow permits quick. even cooling for all the milk, compared to a round tube wherever the center core doesn't cool as chop-chop because the walls.

The plate chiller has high cooling demands, and for many farms this involves a step into the past, back to the days of windmills and milk-can cooling, except now a giant volume of naturally cold underground water is ceaselessly streamed through the plate excitation to quickly bring down the milk right down to the temperature of the underground water at regarding fifty degrees F. The water is usually not simply drop into the bottom once more, but reused for laundry and different functions.
But the milk still is not as cold because it must be, so the milk vessel continues to be accustomed do more cooling, to bring the milk down to 40 degrees. But with the development of high-powered 3-phase electrical service, ice-bank chillers are generally no longer used. Instead the milk storage tank could be a direct-cooling system with cooling coils embedded within the walls of the tank, that quickly pull the heat out and dump it across an oversized array of possibly many completely different high-horsepower compressors and compressing units. Once the milk has achieved 40 degrees F once milking is finished, only one or 2 cooling units have to be compelled to run often to take care of the right temperature.

The milking operation

Original hand milking processesUntil the late 1800s, the milking of the cow was done by hand. In the United States, several large dairy operations existed in some northeastern states and in the west, that involved as many as several hundred cows, but an individual milker could not be expected to milk more than a dozen cows a day. Smaller operations predominated.

Milking took place indoors in a barn with the cattle tied by the neck with ropes or held in place by stanchions. Feeding could occur simultaneously with milking in the barn, although most dairy cattle were pastured during the day between milkings. Such examples of this method of dairy farming are difficult to locate, but some are preserved as a historic site for a glimpse into the days gone by. One such instance that is open for public tours is at Point Reyes National Seashore.

With the availability of electric power and suction milking machines, the production levels that were possible in stanchion barns increased but the scale of the operations continued to be limited by the labor intensive nature of the milking process. Attaching and removing milking machines involved repeated heavy lifting of the machinery and its contents several times per cow and the pouring of the milk into milk cans. As a result, it was rare to find single-farmer operations of more than 50 head of cattle.

Modern milking parlor operations

Farmers use any number of designs of milking parlors to take advantage of cows. Many older farms have post or tie-stall facilities, where the cowss ar brought to the cows and also the milker bends all the way down to apply the machine to the cow. More trendy farms use recessed parlors, where the cows stands in a recess specified his arms ar at the extent of the cow's mamma. Recessed parlors can be textile, where the cows stand in 2 angular  rows either aspect of the recess and also the cows accesses the mamma from the aspect, parallel, where the cows stand side-by-side and the cows accesses the mamma from the rear or, more recently, rotary (or carousel), where the cows ar on a raised circular platform, facing the center of the circle, and the platform rotates while the cows stands in one place and accesses the mamma from the rear. There ar several alternative designs of milking parlors that are less common.

In herringbone and parallel parlors, the milker usually milks one row at a time. The milker can move a row of cows from the holding yard into the milking parlor, and milk each cow in that row. Once all or most of the milking machines have been far from the milked row, the milker releases the cows to their feed. A new group of cows is then loaded into the currently vacant aspect and also the method repeats till all cows ar milked. Depending on the scale of the milking parlor, which unremarkably is the bottleneck, these rows of cows can vary from four to sixty at a time.

In rotary parlors, The cows are loaded one at a time onto the platform as it slowly rotates. The milker stands close to the entry to the parlor and puts the cups on the cows as they move past. By the time the platform has completed almost a full rotation, another milker or a machine removes the cups and the cow steps backwards off the platform then walks to her feed.

Milking machines are control in place mechanically by a vacuum system that attracts the close gas pressure all the way down to fifteen to twenty one pounds of vacuum. The vacuum is also wont to elevate milk vertically through tiny diameter hoses, into the receiving can. A milk lift pump attracts the milk from the receiving will through giant diameter chrome steel piping, through the plate cooler, then into a refrigerated bulk tank.

Milk is extracted from the cow's udder by versatile rubber sheaths identified as liners or inflations that ar enclosed by a rigid air chamber. A pulsating flow of close air and vacuum is applied to the inflation's air chamber throughout the milking method. When close air is allowed to enter the chamber, the vacuum inside the inflation causes the inflation to collapse around the cow's mamilla, squeezing the milk out of mamilla in a similar fashion as a baby calf's mouth massaging the mamilla. When the vacuum is reapplied in the chamber the versatile rubber inflation relaxes and exposes, preparing for the next compressing cycle.

It takes the average cow three to 5 minutes to grant her milk. Some cows are quicker or slower. Slow-milking cows may take up to fifteen minutes to let down all their milk. Milking speed is only minorly associated with amount|the number|the amount} of milk the cow produces - milking speed could be a separate issue from milk quantity; milk quantity isn't determinative of milking speed. Because most milkers milk Bos taurus in teams, the milker will solely method a cluster of cows at the speed of the slowest-milking cow. For this reason, many farmers can cull slow-milking cows.

The extracted milk passes through a strainer and plate heat exchangers before coming into the tank, where it will be hold on safely for many days at some 3°C or around 42°F. At pre-arranged times, a milk truck arrives and pumps the milk from the tank for transport to a dairy plant wherever it can be pasteurised and processed into several product.

Management of the dairy herd

Modern farm farmers use milking machines and refined plumbing systems to reap and store the milk from the cows, which are sometimes milked double or thrice daily. During the heat months, in the hemisphere, cows may be allowed to graze in their pastures, both day and night, and are brought into the barn solely to be milked. Many barns conjointly incorporate tunnel ventilation into the design of the barn structure. This ventilation system is extremely efficient and involves gap each ends of the structure permitting cool air to blow through the building. Farmers with this type of structure keep cows within throughout the summer months to stop sunburn and harm to udders.
During the winter months, especially in northern climates, the cows may pay the majority of their time within the barn, which is warm by their collective body heat. Even in winter, the heat produced by the cows needs the barns to be ventilated  for cooling functions. Many trendy facilities, and particularly those in tropical areas, keep all animals inside at all times to facilitate herd management. Housing the cow can be either loose housed or stalls (called cow cubicles in UK).
Holstein cows on a farm, Comboyne, NSW. In the hemisphere milking animals are a lot of doubtless to pay most of their lives outside on pasture.

There is little analysis on the market on dimensions needed for cow stalls, and much housing may be out of date, however progressively corporations area unit creating farmers aware of the advantages, in terms of animal welfare, health and milk production.

The production of milk requires that the cow be in lactation, which is a results of the cow having born to a calf. The cycle of insemination, pregnancy, parturition, and lactation, followed by a "dry" period before insemination will recur, requires a amount of twelve to sixteen months for every cow. Dairy operations thus enclosed each the production of milk and also the production of calves. Bull calves are either castrated  and raised as steers for beef production or raised for meat. As the size of herds has increased, the conditions in which massive numbers of meat calves area unit raised, fed and marketed on larger dairies also have angry dispute among animal rights activists.