The impact of fetching at night on milking parlour visitation for pasture-based dairy cattle

Abstract

In most pasture-based automatic milking systems (AMS), three-way grazing (3WG) is utilised and cows that remain in a given paddock are fetched or encouraged to the milking facility (each paddock is cleared once per day). Fetching is ideally undertaken within 15 h of the opening of each pasture allocation, where one of these fetches would occur late at night to minimise the risk of cows having extended milking intervals (MI) which negatively impact on udder health. Farmers are understandably reluctant to fetch late at night or in the early hours of the morning (when they would typically be asleep), and the response of cows to being fetched at this time is unknown. Night fetching was undertake..