Watch: milking 660 cows with a mobile parlour in Chile

Chile is a country like no other you will visit. To the very north of Chile is the Atacama Desert, one of the harshest environments on the planet that holds the title as the driest place on Earth.

The arid climate makes the Atacama almost totally inhabitable and it is slowly spreading south all the time, towards Chile’s capital city Santiago. The lack of precipitation in the desert means there are almost never any clouds over the Atacama, making it the perfect home for some of the world’s most powerful telescopes and astronomical observatories.

To the extreme south of Chile, the climate couldn’t be any more different, where the Patagonia region of South America extends down to the archipelago known as Tierra del Fuego. In contrast with the severe heat of the north, the southern tip of Chile is characterised by cold temperatures and biting winds.

But in between the arid north and the cold south, Chile’s climate is typically Mediterranean and productive agriculture is widespread. The countryside of Chile becomes more green and lush as you travel south and the temperature starts to cool.

Dairy farming

As such, most of the dairy farming in Chile takes place in the regions south of the city of Temuco where the climate becomes favourable for grass to thrive. During my time in Chile, I visited the farm of Sven Bergström, a dairy and cereal farmer of Swedish descent.

Aside from growing wheat, barley, potatoes and vegetables on his 5,000-acre farm, Bergström milks 660 mainly Holstein cows that he has divided into three separate herds of 220 cows. Over 600 acres of the total farm are given over to grass for the dairy platform.

However, there are two unique things about Bergström’s dairy farm.

Firstly, Bergström claims to be the only 100% spring-calving dairy farmer in Chile. The calving season on the farm is done within a two-month window from mid-July to mid-September, which are the spring months in the southern hemisphere.

“Mid-September is a big holiday in Chile, so I always aim to have calving done by then,” says Bergström. “We start our breeding season in the middle of October without any heat detection, as we use hormone protocols on the cows. We will use a second round of insemination on cows not in calf after 30 days. Last year, we reached 87% in real pregnancy rates.”

The second unique thing about Bergström’s farm is that all 660 cows are milked in the field via three mobile milking units.

“We have a very unique system here with three mobile milking units. Cows are milked twice a day, after which a tractor moves these milk tanks from the field into the central bulk tank for cooling to 4°C,” he adds.

Bergström says the benefit of this system is that cows are rarely lame, as they don’t have to walk into a central parlour. And for the cows that do get lame, there is no need to cull them from the herd as they can still be milked in the field.

Herd management

The obvious challenge of milking cows in the field like this is the strain it places on the milker to squat down continuously to apply the clusters. However, Bergström maintains his milkers, some of which have been with him over 30 years, are well used to it by now.

Each herd of 220 cows has two employees assigned to it, one of which is the designated herd manager. Employees are paid about €1,300 a month, which reflects the low cost of labour in Chile.

In this mobile milking parlour system, it takes two hours to milk all 220 cows. The parlour is moved to a different spot every day and no lengthy wash-down is needed. The average volume per cow is about 8,700 litres per year. Fat content was 2.5% this year.

Bergström stimulates competition between the three farm managers by posting weekly figures on the performance of each herd on the office wall. Figures on milk volume, fat and protein levels and cell count for each herd are all measured, with bonuses paid to the manager of the best-performing herd each month.

A similar system is used during the calving and breeding season. The minimum target in-calf rate for the herd managers is 80%, for which they will receive a €300 bonus. For every percentage point above this minimum, Bergström pays the herd manager an additional €50.

Managing grass

When I visited his farm in March, Bergström was becoming nervous over grass covers available.

“Right now, we need more grass. We’re growing about 60kg/ha/day,” he said. “During the year, we are growing anywhere from zero grass to 140kg/ha/day. There is no grass growth in July and August, but by October we could be getting growth rates up to 150kg/ha/day. We always have too much grass in October to December,” says Bergström.

To manage the short supply of grass in the autumn months, Bergström is providing his cows with quite high levels of feed during milking. Cows are getting 8kg of a barley/wheat concentrate per day, with 4kg given in the morning and another 4kg in the evening. The barley and wheat is all produced on the farm.

Over the years, Bergström has been reducing his grass platform to give more area over to cropping. Next year, he plans to take a further 50ha away from the cows, meaning he will have to grow more grass on less land.

To do this, he is installing irrigation pivots on some parts of the farm where suitable. Right now, he irrigates his grassland during the dry months using a flood irrigation system. But a pivot system is more accurate with water and Bergström hopes to grow 20% more grass as a result.

Milk price

Once brought in from the fields, the milk from Bergström’s herd is collected by Soprole, Chile’s largest dairy company, which is owned by New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra. Milk prices in Chile were just a little over 0.26c/litre back in March, which was a big improvement from where they had been before Christmas.

Bergström estimates his cost of production, including labour, feed and fertiliser costs, at about 0.19c/litre. Feed costs make up the bulk of this at 0.13c/litre.

“In a normal year, we will make €1,600/ha in profit. But last year was very difficult for milk prices and we made less than €900/ha,” he says. “Dairy co-ops in Chile manage the milk price. They react very fast when the market is in decline, but it takes six months to pass any increases back to the farmers.”

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