Picture of my new gadget !

Put this feed delivery system in back in June/July. Each cow has a hopper that is filled by the flex auger, once the last hopper has filled the auger shuts off.each hopper can be adjusted to the amount of feed the cow should be fed according to her milk production. We feed a half a ton of dairy ration each day. This used to me around 45 minutes per day to feed the cows twice. Now it takes me only ten minutes each day to feed 62 cows their grain twice each day. Once every two weeks I reviw and adjust the feed hoppers according to production. Kind of a gadget, but saves me a lot of time over the coarse of a week. Bruce

Looks nice, bet you like the time saved.

My uncle had a similar set up in his parlor. It worked alright until the cows figured out if the butted it they could rattle a little more grain out of it. Some of those girls could beat the heck out of them.

Most barns I see the butts are to the middle, heads to the outside. Yours is the other way.

Nice feed setup.

Paul

Bruce, how is your bobo after ice skating with the stepladder???
Loren

How long does the flex auger run?
Can the first cow in line start eating when the flex auger starts up?
I guess what I'm asking is how the metering system works so that the first cow in line doesn't get to eat so much more than the last?

What are the "bottles" or whatever hanging above each cow for?

Flex auger fills all the hoppers, the last hopper has a sensor that shuts it down. I run the auger while I am riding the feed cart putting down silage.By the time the silage has been fed ,the auger will have shut it's self off. The cows are far too busy gobbling down fresh silage to even notice the auger run.I simply pull a lever at the end of the row to drop the feed from the hoppers. Each hopper can be shut off if a stall is empty. And Loren , as to my hand boo bo. Cracked one little bone in the back of my hand , still hurts like the Devil if I try to squeeze on something , like pliers, or on the end of a fork handle. So no cast , no bandages, no time off , just light duties for a few days. This means I can still drive the tractor to fill the feed mixer, bring in bales of hay to feed and run the skid steer. .And that is sonny in the picture milking cows while I mess around with my phone, lol. Bruce

Those are the feed hoppers.

Oh, I see... The auger drops feed into the bottles, then down to the cows

usually only 10 mouths or less to feed around here, but I learned a long time ago that any step you can take to shave even a minute off of a daily activity is a godsend.

Saving a half hour a day is a big step.

So that means you can now kick back, put your feet up and read a book for half an hour a day, right?

Now all you need is robotic milkers.

Nice picture. you gotta love that farming ingenuity. The part I liked best is the backward barn full of brown cows. Grew up with a barn that way. Pa redid the layout when the barn cleaner went in. Filled it with 36 BS (brown swiss). Later added a four stall Surge parlor set up. Your outside allies look like they wouldn't fit anything but a Jersey.

My sister used to work for a company that built a computerized feeding system. Each cow wore a tag on a chain that when it stuck its head in a feeder the system would read the tag and auger in the amount of feed that was programmed into the system. Pretty slick for back then, it was powered by an Apple II computer.

Where are the milkers? Or do you have a parlor? Not familiar with this setup. I'm really only familiar with the pasture dairies or free stall dairies that use parlors here in Texas.

That pic takes me back to the early 80's when I worked for what we used to know as a "mixed" farm. We could tie 27 cows (one summer we milked 38) had 4o sows farrow to finish and a herd of 25 or so beef cows. We did about 400 ac of crops.
The tie stall barn had been "modernized" in the 60's with concrete mangers and gutter with stable cleaner. When I first started there we milked with 4 Surge units and a "Bucketeer" than took the milk from the stable to the milk house. In 1982 we put in a pipeline and ran 3 Surge Mini Orbits. The pipeline sure saved a lot of time previously taken up by cleaning buckets. When the cows were tied for the winter I would start first thing by feeding a bit of hay then a cartload of cornsilage, Another cart with home made "chop" (ground ear corn, mixed grain, mineral) then a top dress of soybean meal. Even though the owner did most of the milking I monitored production from our milk yield testing which we did every month or so.
After feeding the cows I would go into the other part of the barn, feed clean sows. fill feeders scrape out the feeder barn and feed calves. After breakfast I would feed a cartload of haylage to the milk cows and more dry hay. Then jump in the truck or on an open tractor with the grinder mixer if need be and head up to the "other"farm and pitch silage out of the silo for the cows and young cattle there. Then you would head back to the home farm to work in the farrowing area of the hog barn (cutting teeth, needeling piglets, weaning etc)til noon. After dinner would be time to grind feed for either cattle or hogs....there was ALWAYS a tractor hooked to the MixAll!
Then to make it interesting, every spring we would tap about 500 maple trees.
Sorry to go on so long but the image of the tie stall barn stirred up some memories.

Do the PVC drop tubes ever plug up? Seems with the bends in them feed would build up and plug and be a bear to get cleaned out.

Bet with all that extra time you are gonna set down, and prop your feet up right?

Gene

I have used a system similar to that to feed sows. The flex auger fills up the first feeder, when it is full the feed overflows and moves on to the next feeder. Once all feeders are full there is usually a mechanism with a wire/arm that triggers a flap on the bottom of the feeder to open up and drop the feed. The flap is adjustable up or down depending on how much feed each animal should receive. In the sow barn this system saved hours and hours of time each day vs. feeding by hand, and was more accurate.

It works well until the livestock figure out they can bang their heads against the tubes to bounce the flaps and release the feed prematurely and receive a larger ration.

We did have plug ups occasionally, usually they could be cleared by banging on the tube, if not the tube had to be pulled off. Ours had a quick disconnect at the top.