Lely Exos winner of DLG Agrifuture Concept Award 2022

The Agrifuture Concept Winner award focuses on the technical possibilities of innovations in the next 5 to 10 years and looks at the realistic chances of implementation. 

Gijs Scholman, Chief Commercial Officer Lely, said: “It makes us proud that Lely Exos is the DLG Agrifuture Concept Winner 2022. With this system, dairy farmers can harvest and feed fresh grass from their grassland. As a result, they use the nutritional value of their grass more efficiently, and can produce more milk from their own grassland. This solution is completely compatible with making dairy farms more circular. I’d like to congratulate all Lely colleagues who are involved in this innovation with this Concept Award. A great recognition for their hard work!” 

The benefits of fresh grass

With Lely Exos, dairy farmers can now use the available grass optimally. The nutritional value of fresh grass is 10 to 20% higher than that of silage grass , because there are no significant losses during harvesting, conservation and feeding. That is why automatic harvesting and feeding of fresh grass results in considerable savings. Feeding fresh grass over silage, farmers can save significant amounts of money on making silage and buying concentrates and other feed purchases.

Lely Exos harvests autonomously and provides fresh grass frequently, day and night. This improves the quality, taste and intake of fresh grass compared to conventional zero grazing systems. Experience at test farms has shown that a dairy farm can meet a significant part of its roughage requirements with fresh grass from early spring to late autumn.

Lely Exos in the field

Lely is continuously working on further developing the Exos system. The current focus is on usage, deployment on different farm sizes and set ups and to learn as much as possible about autonomous harvesting of fresh grass in daily practice. Therefore, the Lely Exos system is operational at a diverse, growing, group of test farms in the Netherlands. The recent results give strong confidence in this concept and Lely is currently starting the preparations for commercial availability.