In the last five years, Irish dairy exports have grown by a third, or almost €1bn, to reach just over €4bn last year.

However, butter, cheese, milk powder and infant formula are not the only dairy products exported from Ireland.

Increasingly, Ireland is exporting its dairy technology to markets all across the world. Pearson Milking Technology, the Athy-based manufacturer of milking systems, is a prime example of this.

Over the last six years, sales of milking parlours to export markets has grown rapidly to account for almost 50% of the company’s total business today.

We won a government contract in Bangladesh to put in milking parlours for a number of 500-cow dairy herds

The family-owned company is exporting its milking parlour systems to markets such as the UK, the Netherlands, Greece, Russia, the Azores and even as far away as Qatar and Canada.

This month, a team of fitters and technicians are busy installing Pearson machines on a number of dairy farms in Bangladesh.

“We won a government contract in Bangladesh to put in milking parlours for a number of 500-cow dairy herds.

"We’re installing these parlours in military bases because the contract is for the Bangladesh army,” says Lloyd Pearson, managing director with Pearson Milking Technology.

A Pearson rotary milking parlour.

“The military in Bangladesh wants to be self-sufficient in milk and produce dairy products to feed its soldiers.

"We’ve a great relationship with the Bangladesh military and we have people over there training soldiers how to use the machines.

"Most people in Bangladesh would never have seen a milking parlour before because cows were always milked by hand,” he adds.

Demand

The growing international demand for Irish milking systems is driven by the new technology manufacturers such as Pearson are building into their systems.

According to David Pearson, export sales director of Pearson Milking Technology and a brother of Lloyd’s, adding technology to milking systems has to be practical for farmers: “Farmers are looking for more technology to manage their cows but with the simplest user interface you can make as possible for speed. We’re lucky that we have quite a few dairy farmer sons working with us who will tell us what works and what doesn’t very quickly.”

Working in partnership with R&D centres in Ireland such as Enterprise Ireland, Hothouse incubation centre in DIT and Queens, Pearson has developed new systems to measure the loss potential on dairy farms.

“Farmers know how much milk they produce by their milk cheque or what goes into the bulk tank. But they don’t necessarily know how much they are losing from mastitis or other health issues,” says David.

“We’ve developed equipment to measure lost milk potential and put a figure on it.

"For example, if cows had mastitis we can show the farmer that 600 litres of milk was lost and then you can put a figure on that for lost income. If you can measure it you can do something about it.”

The company has also adapted its parlour operating and control systems to reflect its increasingly international customer base.

“One thing we’ve noticed in the international dairy industry is that there’s often a lot of migrant labour on farms,” says David.

“We’ve programmed our touchscreen systems that come with the milking machines with 14 different languages.

"So we’ve adapted our system to meet the needs of the labour on large-herd dairy farms as opposed to the farmer managing the business.”

Growth

Pearson has grown alongside the expansion in the Irish dairy industry and has been manufacturing a lot more rotary milking parlours over the last four years, reflecting the growth in herd sizes on many dairy farms.

The company is looking at bringing elements of robotic milking, such as auto-stripping cows, to its herringbone and rotary systems in order to reduce labour for farmers.

“Over the last 10 years we’ve really focused our R&D work on bringing automation to the parlour to try and reduce labour for the farmer.

We spend a huge amount of time looking at how the farmer operates in the parlour and the usability of our equipment

"Farms are getting bigger but finding employees to milk cows is harder,” says David.

“We spend a huge amount of time looking at how the farmer operates in the parlour and the usability of our equipment.

"We’ve also simplified all our equipment and components so service technicians can disassemble and reassemble parts quickly without tools. This makes the machines more efficient from a servicing perspective,” he adds.

Over the coming years, the Pearson brothers have their targets set on entering the US market.

They’ve timed their approach to the US until they felt the business was ready to meet the potential demand from a country with almost 9.5m dairy cows.

However, with farm labour one of the biggest challenges facing US farmers today, Pearson couldn’t have timed its entry to the market any better.