Maybe it’s your favourite tractor – the one you don’t dare shut off in winter for fear it won’t start again. It could be your trusted farm truck that takes you anywhere you need to go.

Did your milking system come to mind? Without wheels or a hood to check under, it can be hard to consider a milking system as a piece of equipment. Yet, take a moment to think it over. Is there anything else on your dairy called upon for as many hours per day and days per year as your milking equipment?

It can be easy to neglect the items that are right under your nose. Something that is seen or worked with on a daily basis doesn’t always trigger a need for extra care.

The equipment you pull out of the shed seasonally, however, usually brings to mind a need to give it a thorough check either before you put it away, once you plan to start it up or both.

That routine maintenance ensures your equipment will be running when you need it most, be it planting or harvest.

In this issue, with a focus on managing a milking system, two authors discuss why taking a closer look at what’s happening within the milking system – from cows to people to equipment – and scheduling regular service can be of great benefit to milk quality and animal health.

Simply reading these articles (everyday observations) and (scheduled service), however, doesn’t always translate into actually getting the job done or turning it into a habit that can be repeated. So how can you implement what was written into a routine?

My first suggestion would be to create checklists specific to your milking system – one for frequent observations and the second for regular service. Keep these handy in a binder in the farm office or tucked in a clipboard hanging on the parlour wall.

Next, implement a method to make sure you review the checklists regularly. It’s been said it takes 21 days to form a habit, but what do you do when the habit needs to be done once every 21 days – or longer?

One easy solution would be to set up a regular service schedule with your milking equipment dealer. Then, should you forget, you’ll at least remember when they pull into the barnyard.

Another method could be writing it on the calendar that hangs in the kitchen or barn office – whichever one you tend to look at would be best.

Thankfully, we also live in a digital era where there are lots of apps that allow you to set tasks with built-in alerts to remind you when something needs to be done.

Personally, I’m a fan of the Remember the Milk app. For starters, its logo is a friendly-looking cow. More importantly, it allows me to build to-do lists, assign dates when tasks need to be done, set the tasks to automatically repeat (daily, monthly, quarterly, however I wish), add notes and tag items as needed.

Even though I use it for daily tasks, I find it to be most helpful with longer-term items I want to remember once every three months or a year from now.

If your hardest-working piece of equipment suffers from neglect, I encourage you to develop a method that will help you remember to take the time to observe how it is operating and perform regular maintenance.  PD

Karen Lee
Editor
Progressive Dairyman magazine