Many employees think their boss pressures them to get finished milking as fast as possible because the dairy wants to save money on employees’ wages. And although that’s partly true, the main reason dairy managers want to keep milkings short is because of the cows. The more time the cows spend in the holding area, parlor and return alleys, the less they eat and drink. And as a result, they produce less milk.
Regardless of the dairy you work at, the four main focuses of every parlor are udder health, milk quality, milk quantity and efficiency. In short, harvest a lot of high-quality milk in a short amount of time from healthy cows.
Keeping cows healthy and harvesting high-quality milk while operating an efficient parlor requires that milkers understand how to value and manage their time. Milking cows is a job of seconds. And that may sound a little exaggerated. But the truth is that seconds make minutes, and minutes make hours.
Let’s say you waste 30 seconds every time you prep a side of cows. That means for every two sides of cows you prep, you lose a minute. So if you milk a total of 50 sides of cows each milking, those 30 seconds add up to 25 minutes over the course of the milking shift. How much easier would your job be if you had those 25 minutes back?
You might say that you’re already working as fast as you can. But the idea isn’t that you need to run or work extremely fast. The objective is to organize your tools and focus on following a well-designed routine. In this column and others to come, I’ll evaluate real-life parlors to show how with a little training and organization they turned a few seconds here and there into extra minutes and sometimes even hours. EL
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