MINNEAPOLIS — The boss cow saunters to the head of the line and, with a flick of her hip, cuts off two other ladies. She’s itching to get at the tasty brown morsels waiting in the feed trough.
“It’s like candy for them,” Lisa Groetsch said as she oversaw milking on her Stearns County, Minn., farm one recent afternoon. “It’s full of protein and nutrients.”
Groetsch and her Holstein herd represent the leading edge in a new wave of farm technology that is sweeping into the Upper Midwest: a dairy robot so sophisticated that it has practically taken the milker out of milking. The robots — which not only milk the cows but also control their feed and adjust their schedules — have spread to about 50 dairy farms in Minnesota and Wisconsin since they were first installed in 2006. The Dutch manufacturer, Lely, recently expanded its North American headquarters in Iowa to include a 36,000-square-foot production facility, the company’s first outside the Netherlands.
Now, Groetsch says, the robots have the potential to save family dairy farms.
Many dairy kids leave the farm because they see their parents slave away in milking parlors twice a day, seven days a week, with never a vacation or even a break for the children’s baseball games. With robots, a mechanical arm handles the milking and each cow chooses its own routine, leaving farmers with more time for family and flexibility for other chores.
“Younger kids like technology. … (Robots) are keeping the new generation on the farm,” said Marcia Endres, a University of Minnesota Extension dairy scientist.
By reducing labor costs and increasing productivity, robots can also help small family farms compete with big dairy operations springing up in California and other states.
But the machines don’t come cheap. Each can cost between $150,000 and $200,000 — a significant investment for small farmers, considering that the price of milk has fallen by about 20 percent in the past year.
After researching the technology for five years, Groetsch and her family got a loan and bought four milking robots in January. They hope to repay the money in 10 years.
Groestsch says the gamble was worth it. The family’s small squadron of farm droids, which includes a mechanical cow-back scratcher and an automatic feed pusher, has turned their barn into a 24-hour operation, with less hired help.
The 3,000-pound, red robo-milkers work around the clock, except for twice-daily cleaning sessions. They also eliminate the chore of corralling cows for milking: After being trained to accept the robot, cows get milked whenever they please. The robot measures their production and knows if a cow needs to be milked more or less often.
The robots may also reduce the farmer’s risk of getting kicked, pinned or tail-whacked, said Dr. Matthew Keifer, director of Marshfield Clinic’s National Farm Medicine Center in Wisconsin. Many dairy-farm injuries occur when the herd is being moved for milking; he and colleagues at the University of Minnesota are studying how technology might be changing injury patterns in the dairy industry.
The robots also could reduce back, knee, shoulder and other repetitive-motion injuries associated with wrangling a dairy herd, Keifer said.
Doug Heintz, a dairy farmer near Caledonia, Minn., said the injury issue influenced his decision to buy two milking robots in 2008. “I didn’t know how long my body could hold up,” he said.
Since she switched to robots, Groetsch says, her shoulders hurt less, but she and her husband have put on weight.
