I’ve mentioned previously we are installing robotic milkers. It’s amazing all the people it takes to get the job done, along with the time and effort. We are retro-fitting our barn so we have construction workers, builders, plumbers, and Lely experts working together. We have three robots in the small barn that are running. There’s angst and excitement at the farm.
Photo by Len Villano
The pre-work started weeks ago. Working with our cows’ nutritionist, we started top dressing our cows’ feed. Top dressing means we are adding the cows new feed to the top of their current feed. This gets the cows familiar with the smell and texture of the new diet they will be fed while being milked by the robot. They love this stuff.
There will be 13 robots in total and we’ll be installing them in three stages. We plan to have them all running by mid- to late September. On my iPad,I see a dashboard that shows me how much our cows are milking, the milk temperature, which cows have been milked, and other key components of the process. If anything isn’t right, the “robot” sends a message to my phone.
We spent a lot of time talking with other farmers about the robots before we installed them, especially our friends at SwissLane Dairy. Their advice was to “stay out of the barn.” What they meant by that was to “let the cow do what a cow does.” Any time you disturb the cows you distract them from eating, drinking or resting. Just letting them do what they want is how we’ll move forward. In the future, we’ll have a glassed-in area for tours. We always have to keep sharing our story. With our robots, hopefully we’ll have even more time to do just that.