The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
At the cutting edge of milk analysis
One of the UK’s top agricultural education centres is to lead the analysis of cow’s milk at source following investment in world-leading technology.
Lodge Farm, at Myerscough College in Lancashire, will be the first farm in the UK to install a state-of-the-art Afimilk’s Milk-Lab – an innovative inline system that has been developed over the last decade in Israel.
The at-source lab works by recording data on milk produced from each cow in a milking herd. The AfiLab element of the system acts as a real-time analyser of the milk’s components, accurately measuring levels of fat, protein, lactose, blood detection and 10-day average Somatic Cell Count banding.
This enables farmers to quickly identify and act on any potential feeding or health issues, improving milk production, milk quality and the longevity of the herd.
The milk analysis will provide an instant health check for each dairy cow, quickly alerting the farmers of the presence of mastitis or other illness.
Afimilk national sales manager Chris Howarth said the installation would become the company’s first official milk lab in the UK.
“We are currently active in 50 countries around the world and our aim is to provide milk producers with superior technology to manage and control dairy farms, enabling profitable production of high-quality milk and dramatic improvement of animal welfare,” said Mr Howarth.
AfiLab technology was launched in 2008 as a system initially used to detect blood in milk, but it has since been developed to monitor individual, group and herd animal behaviour to ensure high levels of health and welfare monitoring.
Mr Shepherd added: “The system has great benefits to both daily as well as lifetime production from the cows. It’s the animals’ daily milk production that pays the bills and this system maximises that, but also ensures herd replacement rates are less as the cows are happier, healthier and live longer.”