5 Years Later !

This blog dates back to January 2020, when I had a great adventure visiting some amazing farms in Chile, primarily as a guest of DeLaval.  The goal was to set up a tour of farms and other venues in Chile for the Progressive Dairy Operators (www.pdo-ontario.ca)for February/March 2021. Two months later we were in Covid lockdown and did not go anywhere for the next two years. In that time Chile experienced a change in government and disgruntled citizens were turning over and burning busses because of a fare increase in the transit system!

 The PDO tour committee wanted to restart educational travel for our members but we chose to keep it safe and simple and went to California in 2023. Last year some members expressed an interest in the Eurotier trade show, so we had a very successful 9 day tour of German farms even though it was a cold and wet November. 

But many of us still prefer touring interesting farms in warmer weather and South America continues to be a place where big things are happening in dairy. The Ancali herd that was the biggest robot herd in the world back in 2020, with 45 robots, now has 90 robots milking 6500 cows and I think the New Zealand investment in the south is also growing every year. So we are now working on plans for a tour to dairy venues in Chile and  perhaps Argentina or Uruguay or Paraguay for late February/early March 2026. 

If you, the readers of this blog have suggestions, connections or leads for us or if you want to be kept informed about our plans please contact me at jack@dairylogix.com.

Today, Sunday January 12^th is my last day in Chile and it began with a 2 hour flight from Puerto Montt back north to Santiago.  I was met at the airport by Jaime Bascuñan Senior and his wife. Jaime is a partner in a large agricultural company that includes a 3 site pig farm with 2500 sows farrow to finish. From the airport we drove 1 hour and 40 minutes south through several fertile irrigated valleys, producing a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and wine. Grain corn was once the dominant crop here and although it is now growing a little further south, there are several large plants processing and bagging hybrid seed corn destined for North America. Our destination is the town of San Fernando, where Jaime’s son (also Jaime) manages Las Garzas, a Christian agricultural school that offers local children a free education from grade 7 up to college age. The school also operates a laboratory that provides soil and plant testing services to the fruit and vegetable industry. The 300 students get a general education up to grade 10 and then start into an ag business stream that includes a lot of practical training working on the school’s 250 acre farm and in the lab. The school has a 480 cow dairy herd, housed in very simple barns that do little more than provide shade over the free stalls. Production is 42 liters per cow on 3 times milking with 35% of the cows receiving BST. This area is heavily dependent on irrigation and with 30% less rainfall than normal for the last 10 years, there is a shortage of water. As a result, the school left a third of its land fallow this year. Most of the water comes directly from rivers fed by glaciers in the Andes and there is no real infrastructure in place to hold back high spring flow with dams or reservoirs. After touring the farm I had the pleasure of having lunch in Jaime’s home and meeting his young family, before heading back to the airport for the long overnight flight home to Canada. All in all this was a great learning experience and I am eager to get started on planning a PDO trip to this country. It will most likely happen the last week of February and first week of March 2021. This is my last post to this blog, but if you are a PDO member you will receive tour updates from PDO. If you are interested in this tour but you are not a PDO member, I encourage you to join, see website http://www.pdo-ontario.ca/   because I am sure it will fill quickly and members are given priority.        

Simple steel and fabric rooves keep cows shaded at the Las Garzas School

For today’s blog I am working on the assumption that a picture is worth a thousand words and will write very little. It is Saturday January 11^th and I have said goodbye to my hosts at DeLaval. I fly back to Santiago tomorrow morning from Puerto Montt airport, which is 100 km south of here. I spent this day playing tourist, and with a car and driver, still compliments of DeLaval, I visited the dominant landmark of this region, the Orsono volcano situated on the shore of Lake Llanquihue as well as the Petrohue Waterfall, ending the day in the resort town of Puerto Varas. When a PDO tour comes here next year this will make a good tourist day for the group as well.

the 8700 ft high Orsono Volcano 

View from the ski resort on Orsono Volcano

Petrohue Waterfall

The falls with the vocano in the background

Puerto Varas

Today was my last day of farm visits with my hosts at DeLaval. Orsono is the head office for DeLaval in Chile, as well as Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru and it has been a pleasure to meet and work with Felipe Aceituno, the Sales Director, and his staff while I am here. The program today included a Tropilla dairy, a commercial pasture based dairy that recently started 4 DeLaval VMS 300 milking robots. This farm has a goal of achieving higher production per cow with a combination of excellent quality pasture and higher levels of supplementary feeding in the robots than what has been customary on pasture dairies. Currently there are 145 cows with 43 more calving in February and a plan to milk 270 cows total. It will be interesting to see what they have learned when we come back with a PDO tour a year from now. We also visit Cooprinsem. Started as a farmer owned semen distributor it is now the largest agricultural supply cooperative in Chile. This coop enjoys a market share of roughly 40% in semen, veterinary drugs, and milking equipment and is also a major supplier of prepared feeds and supplements. They also operate the milk testing laboratory which provides milk recording for 160,000 cows and also does payment testing for processors. I toured their milk recording and feed testing laboratories as well as a local retail outlet.  

Here in Chile, DeLaval has put a great effort into educating producers about cow comfort. They are participating in heat stress research, and have staff specifically dedicated to helping clients address cow comfort issues. They have been excellent hosts, so it was a pleasure for me to give something back today by leading a 2 hour CowSignals seminar to give them insight into the cow behaviour signs we use a cues to cow comfort.

Just so you don’t think all the milking equipment here is blue, I did meet the local Lely dealer and make a brief visit to a dairy with a herd of red cows and 3 red robots. This farm also used 3 way grazing in a layout very similar to the research station.

Tomorrow will be my “tourist day” so get ready for some awesome shots of the Orsono  Volcano, a dominant feature of the skyline in this region.  

When new pasture is offered it gets busy in the robot area on this pasture based dairy with 4 robots.

Cows heading to new pasture through a smart selection gate after milking

Today is my first day in the heart of dairy country. Close to 80% of the milk produced in Chile comes from this region around the towns of Osorno and Puerto Montt. The climate is very similar to New Zealand and dairies here are pasture based and seasonal calving, 60% in spring and 40% in the fall. At 220 pesos per liter, the equivalent of 38 cents Canadian, the milk price here is 10 cents lower than near Santiago, and land is also cheaper at roughly $7,000 Canadian per acre.

Our first stop of the day was the INIA Research station which has just started an ambitious project to compare parlor and robotic milking in pasture based dairying. The original dairy herd at INIA now milks 220 cows in a 2 x 20 midline milking parlor. 100 cows have been reassigned to the new robotic milking dairy, which has 2 DeLaval VMS300 robots, and 2 computer feeding stations in a milking center set up with three selection gates that direct cows to three different pasture areas depending on the time of day. In this “three way grazing system”, going to a new pasture after milking is one of the incentives for visiting the robots. Cows are directed to new pasture at 6 p.m., 2 a.m. and 10 a.m. and any stragglers that don’t come on their own are brought up from the old pasture about 12 hours later.  This research station is also doing work on annual forage crops, heat stress and a variety of other topics.

We also visited a herd of 766 cows milked in a 50 stall rotary that was running for 3 months. Milking now takes 3.5 hours twice per day versus 6 hours in their previous parlor. As a result of increased grazing time and less stress, production increased from 20 to 24 liters per cow. It is summer in Chile and all cows were on pasture now, but this herd did have barn space to house and feed each half of the herd from stored feed between milkings once a day in winter.

Our third and last stop was a visit to the Manuka Dairy Group. Manuka was started in 2009 by 5 New Zealand dairy farming families. Their goal is to become a major milk supplier in South America, using New Zealand management techniques. The company now has more than 25,000 acres of improved grassland, and operates 49 nearly identical farms, each with about 500 acres of grass and 700 small framed coloured crossbred cows, producing about 4,200 litres per cow. Each farm has a milking center with a 2 x 20 swing parlor and a small house for the herdsman. Total permanent staff per farm is a team of three with additional help available for breeding and calving.  The company has its own training facilities for new hires, and lots of protocols, performance measures etc. They have plans to grow to 70 farms by 2025. While each farm unit is a fairly simple enterprise, the possibilities offered by such a large group of dairies under common ownership is mind boggling to say the least.

As is my custom in any foreign country I also made a stop in a grocery store today, and was very surprised by what I found there. I headed to the back of the store expecting to find the refrigerated dairy section strategically placed to encourage impulse buying along the way. It was not there, and it was not anywhere in the store! Grocery stores in Chile do not sell fresh milk. All the milk sold here is UHT processed and sold in 1 litre tetras, transported, stored and displayed without refrigeration for the equivalent of $1.55 Canadian per litre.  They do carry some yogurt and a very limited variety of pre sliced cheeses, but variety is very limited.

Rotational grazing New Zealand style at a Manuka dairy in southern Chile

All in all this was a very interesting day again. It is becoming clear that there is much to see here for a PDO tour.

“Today” on my Chile adventure is Wednesday, January 8. As most of you know, one goal of this trip is to assess the potential for a Progressive Dairy Operators’ tour next winter. In that context, the lesson today is that touring this long and narrow country will involve substantial road time. Bastian and I spent more time in the car than out of it today as we travelled 420 km south on Highway 5, a modern 4 lane road comparable to the 401 back home. The road time was an opportunity to learn more about Ancali. They currently have Herd Navigator on 8 robots with a goal to assess its cost benefit. When Navigator first came out in Canada, I was curious to learn if “cycling cows with silent heats” or cows it flags that pedometers do not, would get pregnant. Looking at farm data, I found that many do conceive, so even well managed herds should see some improvement in repro with this technology. But Navigator does have a substantial operating cost. With 8 robots with Navigator and 64 without, Ancali management are in a great position to assess cost benefit and if PDO visits next year, we may see the results.

Travelling through Temuca we made a quick stop at Granja Llamas Del Sur. If we tour, this could be a “general interest lunch stop”, and perhaps a lesson in “making lemonade”. This small farm was internationally known as a source of breeding stock when llama breeding was of commercial interest. When the bubble burst, owner Alejandra von Baer found new income by making the farm an “animal experience” destination, ranging from petting zoo activities to medically based “animal therapy”.

Dairying in this area is pasture based and focussed on low cost. Bastian shared that indigenous land claims have made land owners here cautious about investing, so they feed only pasture, and milk in the field with low cost mobile “parlors”.

Further south, we visited “Fundo la Invernada”, a fairly new venture raising Holstein bull calves on grass. 4,500 Holstein bull calves per year arrive here at 1 week of age. The calves in the picture are raised on milk replacer to 50 days and housed and fed grain to 100 days before going to full pasture feeding to 180 days of age. At that point, they are moved to a family owned 15,000 head feedlot further north for finishing. Much like in Canada, bull calves are cheap (average price was about $16 Canadian) and margins are tight but this farm has found reliable additional income. At 400 kg, these intact bulls are rented out for 2 days for $120 to perform in Chile’s wildly popular, national sport, the “Chilean Rodeo”. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR_frf9R2uw . I don’t pretend to know the rules but trained riders on trained horses score points cutting and herding these young bulls, and apparently Holsteins are ideal for this. Demand exceeds supply so they plan to expand beyond the 4,500 calves they raise now, mostly to meet demand for rodeo bulls.

We ended our day In Orsono, in the heart of the main dairy area of Chile. Dinner here is rarely before 8:00 p.m., usually involves large servings of excellent local beef or salmon, and some very good wine. When dinner ends at 11:00 p.m., I have no energy to write a blog . . .and that is one of the reasons you are reading about my January trip in mid February!

these calves will be Chilean rodeo bulls when they reach 400 Kg

Chile's national sport . . .Chilean Rodeo

I guess my complete failure as a blogger is now painfully evident since I am long returned from Chile and have not told you anything beyond my first day on the ground. Several “barbs” from readers wondering what happened have prompted me to finish the task and share my story even if it is a month late. So bear with me and perhaps we can pretend it is Tuesday January 7^th . . .my second day on the ground in Chile. This morning started with an 80 minute flight heading south from Santiago to a regional airport in Temuco. I was greeted there by Bastian Mira, the VMS Solutions Manager for DeLaval in South America and together we headed north to the town of Los Angeles, which is about 500 km south of Santiago.  Bastian is enthusiastic and knows the VMS technology inside out so the drive proved very educational for me and gave us a great opportunity to compare notes on robotic milking in general.

The farm visit we made today was unquestionably the highlight of my trip and it was absolutely amazing. I already knew much of the Ancali Dairy story from industry meetings and the internet, but to see it first hand was very special. Six years ago, this dairy milked 6000 cows with three 50 stall internal rotary parlors. That year they built a new barn and equipped it with 8 DeLaval VMS. They got substantially more milk with less labour from the robot cows and built a second 8 robot barn the following year. In 2016 they announced plans for a complete conversion to robots and today the parlors are shut down and there are 66 robots milking and 6 more being installed. Back when I first learned of the plans to retrofit all the existing barns with robots, I was concerned that new barns designed for robots and a small group of robot cows selected from a large herd generally turns into a success story, while a mass conversion of barns with less than ideal layouts is much more challenging.  The results I saw today leave no doubt that this is a success story. Today there are 4100 cows milking on the 66 robots, producing 45.3 Kg milk per cow on 2.74 milkings. One of the great benefits of computerized on farm records is that reliable numbers are right there in front of you and the records available in a herd this size are mind boggling. As shown int the picture above, the Delpro software in the central office can display performance data on all 66 individual robots or provide analysis on any combination of cows or groups you wish to choose. All groups are milk first guided traffic, but with different variations in different barns. Overall performance seemed to be remarkably consistent regardless of the layout or group sizes of 1, 2 or 3 robots. The very long retrofit sand bedded barns had robots clustered at each end with manure scraped and flushed to the center. The robots were managed in clusters of 12 to 16 based on their location close together. Each robot cluster had a daytime team of three employees cleaning stalls and robot rooms, fetching cows and performing most treatment and handling functions. Breeding is done by a crew that circles the farm and feeding, bedding delivery etc are done by other staff. The afternoon and night shift is one person per cluster maintaining stalls and supervising milking. Most groups had a sort pen but it was rarely used. The cluster team sorts the cows they need for breeding, dry off, treatment etc. directly from the group. There is a protocol in place to ensure no cow spends too long in the commitment pen. Fresh cows were milked for two days in the double 10 herringbone located beside the maternity and treatment barn and then moved to one of two robots where cows were milked three times a day at fixed intervals. These cows were in 3 subgroups in the pen that were each given 160 minutes of robot access every 8 hours and directed through by the staff. No doubt making sure fresh cows get in the habit of 3 times milking is a good management practice but they certainly have taken that to the extreme here. In addition to the wow factor of seeing this kind of milk production the quality of cows here in Chile continues to impress and in this herd the emphasis on cow comfort with sand bedding, and good heat stress management with lots of fans is also noteworthy. The management of this dairy feels that they have achieved a 15% increase in production per cow and a 40% decrease in labour per cow with the change to robots. While it is impossible to isolate the reasons for more milk, the suggest lower stress with no trips to the parlors makes for better production directly but also higher feed intake, and better health and fertility. More milk from fewer cows also allows for harder culling, but no matter the reason, management is clearly happy with the results.