Jim Whitehurst Vice Pres. General Manager Shamrock Farms
My name is Jim Whitehurst, I’m with Shamrock Farms in Stanfield, AZ.
We just recently purchased the Puli-Sistem scrubbers for our barn, two double 50 parallels.
The reason we went with the Puli scrubber is that we saw an opportunity to reduce our teat dip cost in half by eliminating the pre-dip, we also expect improved milk quality with the ozone, we think it’s going to do a better job of killing bacteria quicker than the iodine did.
The other two issues that really came to mind when we decided to go with the scrubbers was wastewater control, we generate a lot of wastewater and it looked like an opportunity to re duce the amount of time we ran our showers which will allow us to produce less wastewater, which is becoming more difficult to get rid of.
The other issue is labor, labor here in the Southwest is getting harder to get. People don’t really want to do this kind of work anymore. We were able to eliminate four positions on the dairy and may be able to make it to six total.
We are looking at a big reduction in teat dip cost, a reduction in labor cost, decrease the amount of wastewater that we are having to deal with and if we get the improved milk quality that we expect then that’s icing on the cake. That’s an additional bonus.