The Gibson family in northern Victoria installed five Lely robotic milkers in December 2023 to help overcome a shortage of labour.
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00:00A Victorian dairy farm installed five Lely robotic milkers in 2023 in response to ongoing
00:07labour issues.
00:09When we visited the farm in October, just 10 months after commission, the robots were
00:14operating smoothly and production had taken a big leap.
00:18These are the Lely A5 robots, installed over 12 months ago, but we started on the 4th of
00:28December 2023, so we've been going 10 months or so.
00:33And how many cows are you milking through?
00:35Right now we're milking 320 through.
00:40And what kind of farming system do you have here?
00:43So we're a hybrid system, we graze for half the year, we are on feedlots for a quarter
00:55of the year and we're a combination of both for the rest of the year.
01:01What was the main reason or the main driver for installing a robotic system?
01:05So labour, labour was the issue, couldn't find it, couldn't keep it.
01:12Who we could find, there wasn't a lot of interest in being a good cow person.
01:25People would turn up and do the job if they wanted to, sort of thing.
01:29We needed, you needed someone that was interested in the job and they just weren't available,
01:35couldn't find it.
01:38Backpackers were available.
01:40Actually at the time it was in the middle of COVID so we couldn't get backpackers either.
01:45And the labour market dried up, so we looked at changing our farming system, changed to
01:53irrigated cropping and broadacre cropping.
01:58In a good year with good prices we probably could have done all right, but in a dodgy
02:01year with dodgy prices we couldn't.
02:03Nothing was going to provide the same income that the cows do, so it still took us a while,
02:15like it took a while to build it.
02:18It was probably a three-year process between first phone call and milking cows through
02:26the robots.
02:27So it was a fair bit of planning, it takes me a while to figure these things out, so
02:32you know, I had to speak to a lot of people.
02:36Anyway, decided, paid a few bills, made some decisions and started construction.
02:47Construction finished, we had to start up the robots, started in November last year.
02:52That was a couple of weeks of fairly intense...
02:57What's happened with milk production since you've introduced the robots?
03:03So, so far, and to be fair, it was a very mild winter this year for us up north, of
03:10where we grew a fair bit of grass.
03:12It wasn't cold, it wasn't wet, it was, you know, good drought conditions, but you know,
03:19we still grew a fair bit of grass and we irrigate now, so taking that into account, we're up
03:24about 28% from autumn to now, production.