Dr Cameron Clark from the FutureDairy program said that while there was plenty of anecdotal evidence from farmers that cows could be called to the dairy, the study paved the way for farmers to use cow calling as a powerful management tool.

“It’s given us the confidence for further research on the best way to train cows and to look at the potential to train individual cows to respond to their own unique sound.

“It has potential application on farms with both conventional milking systems and robots,” he said.

“Dairy farmers can spend more than seven hours a week herding the cows up to the dairy for morning and evening milking sessions. The use of automatic gates and calling sounds could eliminate this daily task,” Dr Clark said.

The concept has even greater potential application in voluntary milking systems where cows move by themselves from the paddock to a robotic dairy and back to the paddock.

In robotic dairy systems, there can be no defined morning and evening milking periods with milking occurring throughout the day and night.

One of the challenges with voluntary milking systems is that there is always a small group of cows that are less motivated to move around the farm such as cows in late lactation.

These cows need to be ‘fetched’ from the paddock for milking. Although it is a small task, it must be built into the routine to avoid these unmotivated cows having milking intervals that extend beyond about 16 hours.

Left any longer, these cows are at risk of reduced production and mastitis.

“We are interested to know whether we can train these cows to respond to their individual sound and walk to the dairy to be milked by the robots,” Dr Clark  said.

Student Alexandra Green used a system where a sound was played when cows were fed to train them to come when the sound was played.

FutureDairy, sponsored by Dairy Australia, DeLaval and the University of Sydney, is a research project aimed at addressing the challenges likely to face the dairy industry in the next 20 years.