Jan-Erik Hansson is a dairy farmer in Hälsingland, Northern Sweden. He has experienced great improvements since he installed 18 Lely Astronaut A4 milking robots in 2017.
He started with 16 cows and now has up to 1050 cows in production with an aim to increase this to 1,300. They have a total of 2,300 animals on the farm.
“We were convinced that we would need a rotary. We looked at 60-unit rotary parlours, we had the drawings and plans, contacts with the bank had been arranged and everything was ready, but we realised we would have problems with staffing.”
“Where would we find staff? That’s why we started looking at robots. We were sceptical at first. We didn’t believe it was the right system for us since we had so many cows but, the more we thought about it, the more we realized that robots were definitely an alternative.”
“Today we have 18 robots that we started up at the end of August 2 years ago. We have two more coming in that we’ll install in the winter so we will soon have 20 robots in total.”
Since the robots were installed, production on the farm has increased by 22-23% and the cell count has dropped by 15%. The fertility of the herd has also improved.
Video source: Lely YouTube
