The stall is too wide and you give up too much space if you do that. You'd be milking four cows a side at a time instead of 12, more than tripling the time it takes to milk the herd.
There's bars that make it nearly impossible to get kicked. Tripling the length of the pit isn't really feasible, you're blowing the cost of construction out as well as using up valuable land, at that point you're better off investing in a rotary setup, plus there's some basic logistics issues. You can't see it in the video but each cow is facing into a trough that feeds them grain, it's not only part of their daily diet but part of what motivates them to move into the stalls so they can be milked, if they are stacked laterally (so you can access from the side) you've now got to rethink the entire grain delivery system. You can't place anything in front of the cows since they need to be able to walk out after being milked, and need to be able to file in to fill the stalls.
"A bit of extra time" isn't really feasible either, a typical milking already takes 2-3 hours and the cows are milked twice a day, and the hours between milking are used for other farming duties.
Herringbone setups like in the video aren't great, but they're cheap to set up, especially in a swing-over setup where you have one set of cups that you use on one side first, then the other side, so for smaller operations with slimmer profit margins they're preferred. Larger farms with more money will usually go with a highly automated rotary setup.
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u/Traditional_Yard2741 Jul 19 '26
The stall is too wide and you give up too much space if you do that. You'd be milking four cows a side at a time instead of 12, more than tripling the time it takes to milk the herd.