| In recent years, dairy industry in China has been promptly developed with the agriculture structure adjustment and more people drinking milk. The number of dairy cows grows sharply while milk production and consumption increase continuously. The rapid development of dairy industry promotes the utilization of milking parlors. The number of milking parlors used in the dairy farms in China has been increasing gradually as well as the percentage of milk volume produced by milk parlors.By comparison with the manual milking, milking parlors have a lot advantages such as improving milk quality, working efficiency and raising management level. These features lead to the prompt acceptance of milking parlors by dairy farmers. With dairy herds becoming bigger, one of the main obstacles to the further development of dairy farms is how to increase the milking parlor performance and efficiency. Therefore, parlor performance evaluation techniques are urgently needed in practices in order to compare the performance of Herringbone, Parallel and Rotary parlors etc. which are in commonly use today.The target parlors in this study were double-6, double-12 and double-16 Herringbone parlors, double-12, double-20 and double-40 Parallel parlors, and PER Rotary 30, 48, and 60 stalls. The research data were collected through manual record as well as computer database of herd management system. The study examined milking procedure, parlor specification and configuration, number of milkers, milk production and milking parameters etc.The investigation revealed that true evaluation of parlor performance could be made with both measures of input processing such as cows per milker per hour(CMPH) and turns per hour(TPH), and measures of output... |
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