ICAR Technical Series no. 7 - Nitra Proc.

Veysset et al.The physical arduousness of the work also decreases. The proportion ofmanual labour decreases considerably and is replaced largely by the taskof observing the animals, by office work (consulting the listings and thedata recorded by the AMS) and by technical maintenance work.According to all accounts, the farmers must prepare themselves for adifficult period of adaptation and possibly to cope with the economicand/or human consequences.The method which we used involves calculating partial budgets of thedairy unit. The method is similar to that used by Dijkhuisen et al. (1997),Favre et al. (1998), Arendzen and Van Scheppingen (2000). We attempt todetermine the additional cost of the AMS:S = R SdT- R RWhere S = extra cost of the AMSR SdT= profit made by the dairy unit with a milking machineR R= profit made by the dairy unit with an AMSEconomicadvantages ofAMSPresentation of themethod.With : R = (MB al+ MB sl) – (A + MO)Where R = profit made by the dairy unitMB al= dairy unit gross marginMB sl= vacated area gross marginA = annual repayments on the investment in milking machineryMO = labour costWe carried out simulations on three farm types (“60 DC”, “80 DC” and“100DC”) defined from our sample by selecting according to the volumeof milk produced. The flock of 60 dairy cows of the “60 DC” farm typecorresponds to the optimum announced by the manufacturers for a singlestall robot. The 100 dairy cows of the farm type “100 DC” requires tworobots of the Lely concept and three milking stalls of the Prolion concept.As far as the “80 DC” farm type is concerned, it constitutes an intermediatecase which requires two stalls for the Prolion concept and two robots forthe Lely concept.We placed ourselves in a situation where the farm operated at cruisingspeed rather than in the first year of installation which is rather disrupted.These disruptions are very difficult to calculate since they are mainly linkedto individual factors.HypothesesICAR Technical Series - No 7145