Livestock Farm Practice

MILKING INTERVAL

• The pay off in dairy farm operation is the harvesting of the milk crop twice daily.
• As nearly as possible milking cows at 12 hours intervals is desirable.
• Milking interval should be evenly spaced particularly with cows at the height of their lactation which should be 12 hourly instead of 14 and 10 hours interval.
• Three times milking should be only for very high milking cows which is necessitated to reduce milk load in the udder and lessen tendency to become pendulous.
• If equal interval of milking is not possible for twice daily milking, continue 3 times milking until yield is down to about one-half of the recorded peak.
• The change from thrice to twice daily milking can be made without any drastic reduction in yield when a cow's daily yield has fallen to two-third of a peak yield.
• With a normal period of 10 to 14 hr interval, the butter fat level is higher at morning milking than at the evening milking which may be up to 1 per cent.
• Milk yield is increased by up to 15 per cent with thrice daily milk­ing but despite slightly lower butter fat percentage an overall greater weight of fat is obtained.