An innovative project leading the way in chemical free cleaning for dairy farms has won nearly £200,000 in innovation funding, as part of Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and Innovate UK’s Farming Innovation Programme: TFP Follow-on Funding.
Though chemical treatments exist, they are expensive for dairy farmers and not a sustainable solution for the future of the planet. Oxi-Tech’s Pulse OxidationTM Dairy (POD) is a unique, patented system that creates charged Oxygen within water by using water and small amounts of electricity to create Ozone in-situ. This chemical-free cleaning solution offers many benefits to dairy farmers without the drawbacks of residual chemicals. Pulse Oxidation energises cold water to create a clean but powerful disinfectant that includes a range of activated oxygen molecules which are globally recognised as powerful microbial biocides, killing bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa.
“We have harnessed the most effective industrial biocide on the planet using just water and low voltage electricity in a process called Pulse Oxidation,” explains Oxi-Tech’s Paul Morris. “Compared with an automated milking system’s existing cleaning system requiring energy to heat the cleaning water, this unique technology uses approximately 50 times less energy, equating to running just one laptop and four low energy light bulbs. We consider typical return on POD investment to be three years based on two milking robots.”
With milking robots as an obvious first opportunity to target, an Oxi-Tech system will be fitted to one of the Lely milking robots at the UK Agri-Tech Centre’s South West Dairy Development Centre. Through a combination of Lely Horizon milk quality data (per cow and per robot), plus a Somatic Cell Count (SCC) sensor in the milk-line from the robot, the data will clearly elaborate milk quality per cow and per robot.
Mike Jones from the UK Agri-Tech Centre said:
“Oxi-Tech have developed a system that eliminates the use of chemicals to clean milking robots’ internal network of pipes and tubes. To do this without the need for chemicals is a game changer for robotic milking, with the added bonus of less energy usage”.
Paul Morris, CEO at Oxi-Tech, said:
“Oxi-Tech has been proud to work with the fantastic team at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, and the wider group of respected industry experts working with us on this project. If successful, the implications of removing chemicals from disinfecting water are profound. The technology could change not just dairy farming, but other forms of agriculture, and could help reduce the carbon footprint across the food industry as a whole”.
Oxi-Tech also offers UK dairy farmers significant progression towards net zero emissions, with a 5-tonne reduction in annual CO2 footprint on a typical UK dairy farm. By reducing the dependence on the supply chain for chemicals, Dairy farmers will increase their resilience.