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18 May 2017, 15:26
Mr. Verweij is a dairy farmer and cheesemaker. Together with his wife and two brothers he runs the family business in Polsbroek (the Netherlands). Together, their 340 dairy cows produce 10,000 kg of Gouda cheese a week. For a tasty raw milk cheese, the quality of the milk is the most important factor. The milk that Verweij produces has a fat content of 4.6% and a protein content of 3.9%. These great milk contents are the result of carefully composed feed rations. "If the rations are off, you can tell immediately from the resulting hoof problems, manure structure, milk production and the milk content levels.
When the stables were rebuilt in 2014, Verweij decided to implement an automatic feeding system. "The capacity of the Triomatic system was the deciding factor for me. We feed the dairy cows 18 times a day and the other groups 12 times. If we didn't have such a good feeding robot, we would have to hire extra personnel. But even then, we wouldn't have the flexibility we have now. In the past, we would feed a maximum of 4 loads a day using a feed mixer. This also cost much more time. We lost about six hours a day to ensilaging, filling the feed mixer and discharging the feed. Now, all we have to do is replenish the feed kitchen, which we usually do on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The feeding costs us a total of 12 hours a week which includes the silage work and adapting the rations. The feeding continues as normal on weekends without us needing to do a thing. This makes us enormously flexible as we can now utilize this time saved to do something else.
The second deciding factor for Verweij in choosing the Triomatic feeding robot is the mixing quality. Verweij: "Since implementing the Triomatic system, the stables are quiet and our feeding efficiency has increased considerably. The robot mixes really well, the cows can't be selective and that translates to better returns. Thanks to the excellent mixing results, we now need much less concentrate than we used to."
Source: Trioliet