Milk producers should have drone technology to measure grass cover

“According to Kingshay costings, a litre of milk from concentrates will cost you about 14p, or roughly half your milk price. From grass or maize silage it will be roughly 7p.

“But if you send the cows out to do the harvesting themselves, it is about 3p.

“We’re aiming to develop precision grazing and I can entirely understand why producers don’t like the inaccuracy and imprecision of grazing – they have much more precision when they are feeding with a mixer wagon and when they turn them out to grazing they lose that level of precision.”

But he said technology would help put precision into grazing.

“I think we can do a lot with soil sensors which are telling us about the moisture content of the soil, the temperature and even the biological activity in the soil,” he said.

“If we can combine that with meteorological data, we should be able to get a much better forecast of the forage availability going forwards.”

Asked about how the robotic milking was working with grazing, he said there were always one of two late lactation cows which were reluctant to return as their concentrate
lure was insufficient to entice them back.