A couple of years ago my sister-in-law met and married a Dutch dairy farmer; around here that wouldn’t be much of a feat because there are plenty of Dutch dairy farmers in Northwest Iowa… but they now live on the farm in Holland! Keeping up with family means Skype and long airline rides are pretty much the norm. They made the trip back for a holiday visit a couple of weeks ago, and had some fun showing off (via photos & video anyway) the new toys they installed in the dairy barn; two milking robots.
The robots were designed & built by Lely, a Dutch farm equipment manufacturer. And they truly are robots; aside from routine maintenance, they require no human intervention to milk the cows. They and the cows just hum along, day and night, and in the process milk production is bumped up by a decent amount, which allows the dairyman to increase the size of the herd and focus on other details of running the farm. They really are pretty amazing:
- The cows are trained to walk into the machines when they feel the need to be milked (on average, 2.8 times a day)
- RFID tags allow the machine to recognize individual cows as they enter.
- A portion of feed is dispensed that is custom blended to meet that particular individual’s nutritional needs.
- The robot cleans the udder & teats,
- It then uses a laser tracking system to locate the individual teats and attaches a suction device to each and begins milking.
- When finished, it detaches from the cow and turns her loose from the stall.
- The robot then cleans the suction devices and prepares for the next cow.
- As the milk is drawn, the quantity tracked, and the chemical composition is analyzed to diagnose potential health problems in the cow.
- If the analysis shows the milk fails to meet predetermined quality standards, the milk is discarded.
- The computer controlling the robot also keeps statistics for the entire herd, allowing the dairyman to keep track of trends and potential issues with individual cows.
Since the thing is controlled by standard PC hardware, they were able to pull up the machine via VNC to check up on things; it was evening when he was showing this to me, but about 3 am local time at the farm, and we saw that a cow had just stepped into the machine. Apparently one of the things that helps to boost milk production is that the old way of doing things — milking twice a day — doesn’t really fit with a cow’s natural cycles, as is shown in the stats with the robot; on average, they will go in to be milked 2.8 times a day. And they will go in at all times of the day and night, whenever they feel the need to be milked, which I would think makes for happier cows!
The video below shows the machine in action;