https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10458494/
This is the dairy I used to work in as a kid on my family’s farm back home. I would help out when needed and learned to milk the cows and bottle feed the calves in the adjacent barn. It was fun.
We visited Sweetwater Valley Farms this weekend and got to take a tour of the facilities, specifically the “Robot Milking Facility”. I’ve kinda gone down a rabbit hole lately learning about all the new dairy tech available (articles, Youtube videos, etc.). Robotic automation and AI have really done some cool stuff. The cows wear their own tracking tag that identifies them, monitors their health and tracks their eating habits. It also allows them into the automated milking facility (seen here) where (if they are deemed healthy by the provided health metrics) they are milked by the robot. Each robot is from a Dutch company and costs about $250K. It ID’s the cow, cleans her, then uses lasers to scan/lock onto her utters (which are unique as a fingerprint, I just learned) and attaches the milking cups to extract the milk. The milk is monitored/tested and only collected if it passes inspection. After milk extraction the cows utters are automatically cleaned like a car wash and they are released back into the herd.
At my grandfather’s dairy, we would milk (manually) 2x per day. In the robot barn the cows can choose to come and be milked at their leisure which leads to more production (and less manual labor). When they’re not producing milk they are in the climate-controlled indoor lounge, eating and chilling out.
