Running a dairy farm used to be a rather hands-on experience, with the farmer required to be around every few hours to milk the cows, feed them, do all the veterinarian tasks that the farmer can do themselves, and so on. The introduction of milking machines in the early 20th century however began a trend of increased automation whereby a single farmer could handle a hundred cows by the end of the century instead of only a couple. In a recent article in IEEE Spectrum covers the continued progress here is covered, including cows milking themselves, on-demand style as shown in the top image.
The article focuses primarily on Dutch company Lely’s recent robots, which range from said self-milking robots to a manure cleaning robot that looks like an oversized Roomba. With how labor-intensive (and low-margin) a dairy farm is, any level of automation that can improve matters will be welcomed, with so far Lely’s robots receiving a mostly positive response. Since cows are pretty smart, they will happily guide themselves to a self-milking robot when they feel that their udders are full enough, which can save the farmer a few hours of work each day, as this robot handles every task, including the cleaning of the udders prior to milking and sanitizing itself prior to inviting the next cow into its loving embrace.
As for the other tasks, speaking as a genuine Dutch dairy farm girl who was born & raised around cattle (and sheep), the idea of e.g. mucking out stables being taken over by robots is something that raises a lot more skepticism. After all, a farmer’s children have to earn their pocket money somehow, which includes mucking, herding, farm maintenance and so on. Unless those robots get really cheap and low maintenance, the idea of fully automated dairy farms may still be a long while off, but reducing the workload and making cows happier are definitely lofty goals.
Top image: The milking robot that can automatically milk a cow without human assistance. (Credit: Lely)
Not to be that guy but self milking/robot setups have been part of the dairy community for a long time now. I’m not sure how this is a hack, recent news, or anything really.
I’ll ignore the above…
I mean not really it is pretty funny.
anyway
Most/all studies show that cows that can happen into the automated milking station whenever they please is pretty much better in every way. Happy cows make happy milk or something.
Milking robot are just a pain to maintain every day: it is real that you dont need anymore to go 2 times a day during 2h , 12 hour apart , to milk the cow. but the robot need a lot of maintenance, sending text message all day long because she’s unhappy. The 4h daily hand work for The cow is now tranfered to maintain The robot and her needs.The air compressor needed make all mechanic or car painter full of envy. And we can go on and go on. At the end, you have paid a 300k ( top low price, it can jump fast to really more) to just have the luxury of displacing the hand work from the beginning and end of the day to the middle. And you dont skip giving full bag of money to Lely or alpha laval every month.
Milking robot are essentially made to milk the farmers.
And if something bad happen with the robot ( external, like flood fire or thunder) you lose everything in a spectacular way, hundred unmilked cow is not something fun to watch.
Those are good points, indeed. The milking setup on our farm was quite basic, with the cows being lined up for a quick clean of the udders before the vacuum cups were put in place. Beyond the vacuum system and the milk tank there wasn’t so much that could go wrong, and I don’t remember there ever having been issues.
Probably why neither our farm nor any others in the area had bothered with such automation. The dairy farm focused magazines would of course praise their convenience. When you get to choose between potentially expensive maintenance vs spending some time each day mostly handling those vacuum cups and herding cows in for milking…
Same with those other robots, such as for cleaning manure off the concrete grills in the stables. That was a quick (and kinda fun) run through with a rubber-edged tool which me and my siblings often got assigned. Having an expensive robot do that work instead and inevitably breaking down or doing a poor job seems like a nightmare.
Manure cleaning robots…. A lot of story on that..
After hand cleaning, tractor puching the manure, we saw winch activated manure cleaning device. Push button activated, One or two electric winch who never fail, one câble got loose or break every two or three years. Easy use, Easy and cheap fix when fail. But you have to push that button 10 times a day and wait for The job to be done. And here come the robots…
the 2 years lasting batteries who always have been advertised as consumable, is not convinient but easy, advertised as such, and pricey without needing to sell a kidney. The Electronic, charger or robot main board, on the other hand are not suppose to be a consumable! But they are just bad at taking all daily abuse you can see on a farm. So, lot of money spend on spare part (would have been cheaper to by one every two years , after the warranty end) and hand on that every two or three months.
But The first Time you have to take a swim in the manure “pool” to save a new born calf push by the robot, you want to blow the robot with fire. Second time, you know that fire will not be enough, you want him to die drowned, burnt, Frozen, hanged, dislocated and roll on by a 40ton truck , all at the same time. I didn’t find a way to do that but if someone know, i have two or three robots who need this type of care.
And the worst, to avoid bad thing to happen, only fix the seller had was hand activated method, and looking what the robot is doing….yeah, like the winch method, but 15 times more expensive….
I know several farmers who have Lely robots and they have almost no issues and have been using these machines for years. Maybe they are lucky. Maintenance for them is a lot lower than hiring people to help with milking the cows. They have smaller dairy farms with 150-200 cows. I know someone with a tiny farm with 60 cows that still milks with the old suction cups from a pit. That’s a lot of hard work.
I love those manure cleaning robots. So much fun to watch and the cows are so chill around it.
Cows are so curious, I would love to see the first time the mucking bot shows up and starts mucking out the stalls. I’ve seen cows form an investigation circle (best way I can describe it) around a littered Coca-Cola can, so the cows meeting the robot has to be hilarious.
I agree
About fifteen years ago, I’ve worked on milking robots from Merlin and step counters to detect when cows are in heat. From a distance, these machines are magical, but as an engineer I know these systems have what is in Dutch known as ‘slimme geitjes’. =A play on words with clever solutions, with the literal translation being ‘smart goats’.
Working on the farm was great, but it’s rather a hostile environment for electronics, with ammonia from the manure as well as harsh cleaning chemicals. It wasn’t too uncommon to receive boards for repair, of which components could be plucked with tweezers. If six components were missing, or could be removed, the board was scarp. Otherwise, we did component level repairs. I’ve learned a lot from working on these devices.
I just met one of these robots last November. My cousin runs an artisanal cheese company, He’s not a huge dairy farmer or anything, I think he has somewhere around 50-80 cows. He bought a used 2010 Lily A3 Next for $20k 3 years ago. He hasnt had any issues with it so far. He says its one of the best purchases he has ever made. Watching it scan, clean, and milk a cow all by itself was pretty cool. Watching the cow walk away, and another cow walking in all on its own was trippy. He said he had to lead them in the first couple of weeks then they just started self milking once they learned where to go. Kinda crazy.
I briefly worked as a hand on a raw milk dairy farm in WA state during the covid insanity. While changing out parts on their tractor I got to talking with the owner about the automatic milking robots. He said it came down to cost of ownership, both in time and money. He said the biggest advantage would being able to get more data on each cow by analyzing the milk before it went into the main tank.
As Garrut mentioned above it really is about deferred and offset labor.
And like you mentioned, quality control. The milk gets analyzed at the most granular level, and it gets you indirect metrics on the cow itself.
The cows have learned to visit the milking, feeding, and resting stations. Why can’t they learn to visit pooping stations?
We have to figure out how to make humans poop only in a designated spot first!
They do have potential on large farms but on many of the farms that I know of they wouldn’t fit unless you built a new barn.
Im not sure where you draw the small farm/large farm line,
Google says A typical dairy farm in the US has around 115 mature cows.
74% of US dairy farms have less than 100 cows,
But 65% of the Nation’s Dairy herd live On 1,000 plus cow operations.
My cousins Lely A3 Next was installed in a single stall of his barn. Its not that big at all. I pulled up the specs on their website
Height: 229 cm (90.16 in)
Length: 423 cm (166.54 in)
Width: 198 cm (77.95 in)
The newer A4 and A5 are 131 inches long, 93 inches tall, and 90 inches wide.
One lely robot can handle 60-70 cows.
Turns out I was right with my estimate of 50-80 cows, my cousin says he has 75 cows but only 50-60 are “in milk” at any given time). He considers his operation small.
Now I dont know if the $200k is targeted to small dairy’s budget, Maybe it is? But in talking with my cousin this morning, I found out that he knows a BUNCH of farms who have bought second hand units like his in the $15-25K range. He says when the big dairies upgrade the little guys jump to buy. He is thinking of buying a second one as a standby so he is covered if his ever fails.
I don’t know if i could install by myself a free given milking robot for only 15k, maçonerie, piping and cable only.
15k robot can be seen, but Like you said, this price is from sales by big farm needing to sell fast, not the real value of the robot, making small business jump on it.
In France ,15k is the price for a second hand manuel milking station fitted with 18 automatic release succion cups, without install.
If you do a websearch youll find that its not a “fire sale” price for older models. Thats just the resale price of the A3. When large dairy operations upgrade they arent getting rid of one or two machines. They are getting rid of 10-20, so theres a pretty decent supply of them coming to market all at once. The farms looking to buy are only going for 1 or 2, so the auction price stays pretty low. You even see them at second hand machine broker sites like machinio.
Yes there is an expense to install involved, but its not as huge as you may imagine. The lely systems are fairly self contained and unless your running a bunch of them together to centralized tanks, you dont have to run much more than power. They do require a bit of concrete work for their base, though there are comapnies that sell prefabricated drop in place concrete base systems for them. I dont know the price. My cousin worked construction for 15 years before marrying into his farm, so he poured his own base from plans supplied by lely.
Its not a terribly complex nor large construction as you can see here
https://westcountryconcreteproducts.co.uk/agricultural-products/lely-milking-robot-bases/
Ultimately, these expenses arent a huge barrier considering, as you said “15k is the price for a second hand manuel milking station fitted with 18 automatic release succion cups, without install.” so $15-20K for an older robot leaves quite a bit of wiggle room for installation expenses when a new robot, which would require the same installation expenses, costs $200k.
BTW theres a Lely a3 classic on milcotec in denmark for only €6,760.00 Thats about half what my cousin paid for his.
“Unless those robots get really cheap and low maintenance, the idea of fully automated dairy farms may still be a long while off,”
raises a couple thoughts in my mind…obviously the fully-automated dairy farm is a long way off but truly no one cares about ‘low maintenance’, they just want ‘less maintenance than the alternative’. that’s something that i appreciate more every day.
and the other thought is, we just need a robot to repair/clean the robot that repairs/cleans the robot that repairs/cleans the robot that repairs/cleans the cows :)
I’ve heard about a lot of benefits from feeding robots. I guess part of it comes from not driving thru the barn with loud skid steers or tractors, not dragging in as much dirt/muck with the tires and keeping everything in the feed area much more tidy and clean.
What i don’t hear much about is, how easy it is to fix and repair these machines when something inevitably breaks. Are they trying to go the John Deere path and lock down everything, so the farmer has to call a service tech every time, or are they more open to let farmers help themselves?