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Writer's pictureDenis Langlois

Crying Over Spilled Milk.....

Have you ever seen this chart about how to measure things like a Canadian?

Well, to add more clarity to the mud board, it seems like we should add a category for milk. Is it mass or volume? Yes. Since the Lely milking robot weighs the milk, it is measured as a mass and in the metric system here in Canada – so, Kg is the unit used. But your milk is getting paid and picked up in volume – also in metric – so, Litres is the unit used. Have you ever looked at your milk pick up slip and seen, for example, 6,654 Liters but Horizon was showing it as 6,924kg? Don’t cry over spilled milk just yet…


How do you make sense of it all and compare the 2 measures?


This certainly is not a perfect conversion rate, but one liter of milk weighs approximately 1.032kgs (it could be somewhere between 1.029 to 1.035 depending on milk solids). Therefore, if your milk tank has 1000L picked up by the truck, it contained 1,032kgs of milk.


Since the two systems are using volume for one versus mass for the other, it can make it less evident to detect if we have some milk loss in the system. To confirm system function and accuracy, it is a good idea to compare the two measurements once a month. As a rule of thumb, it should be around or under ~1-1.2% difference (see example calculation below). If you are concerned with the numbers you are seeing, contact your milk and cooling technician or your FMS advisor.


Example:

My milk pick up was 6,654 Liters on BCMilk.


And Horizon shows 6,924 kgs were picked up.


Is this ok?


Multiply 6,654 by 1.032 = 6,866kg


Now divide 6,866kg by 6,924kg = 0.9917


(0.9917*100)-100 = -0.82% difference.


The system is within the acceptable difference of ~1-1.2%.



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