Sound Stories. Sound Voices.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
You are on the KUOW archive site. Click here to go to our current site.

These Dairy Robots Let Cows Choose When They're Milked

If anyone should be a traditional farmer, it would be Alan Mesman. His family has been farming for six generations near La Conner, Washington. But last year, Mesman became the second of six farmers in the state who are trying a new tool that’s helped them cut labor costs and reduce the workload.

Robots.

“So no one milks cows on this dairy, kind of unusual,” Mesman said. “No, there are two robots. They run night and day, they don’t ever stop.”

Washington dairy farmers need the extra help. They like to say they raise the only commodity that harvests twice a day, year round. It’s not like berries, wheat or apples, which have a harvest season once a year.

In dairy, the work is non-stop, often from six in the morning until ten at night. Besides milking two or three times a day, there’s breeding and caring for any sick animals. Plus, milking cows need to eat 30,000 calories a day, so growing feed crops and monitoring their nutrition adds even more work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeUrf90haKU&feature=youtu.be

On top of this arduous schedule, farmers also face economic pressures. Milk prices often fluctuate and sometimes don’t cover the cost of production. So many dairy farmers have had to quit farming.

“There are 480 dairy farms right now in Washington state. So it just keeps declining,” said Janis DeJager, the current Washington state dairy ambassador for the Washington State Dairywomen. 

There used to be nearly 2,000 dairy farms here in the 1960s.

DeJager said farmers are losing ground. “But farming is in our blood so you’re going to work through that. You know, it’s a part of you who you are.”

Lynden dairy farmer Louis Bouma sees robots as a way to deal with the downward trend. He installed a robot system last spring.

To milk, his cows walk into a big steel closet set in the side of the barn. A shiny silver tube taller than a man maneuvers a long jointed arm and pincers that deftly pluck scrubbers, long black hoses and suction cups from a rack.

“First it sprays her udder with a disinfectant and then it takes a wash cup and it washes each quarter, each teat and after it’s done with that it goes to the milk cups and attaches the milk cups and she milks.”

Each cow wears a computer chip that helps guide the robot. The arm uses laser beams to locate the cow’s teats. “The one thing about robots is they like things their way,” Bouma said. “If the teats are close together it has real difficulty. Your cows have to adapt to the robot, you don’t adapt to the cows.”

But the cows love the robot, Bouma said. They’re free to go into the robot station and milk whenever they want. They get a special grain treat as an incentive while they’re milking. In fact, Mesman said some try to double dip before they’re due and the robot has to gently shoo them off with a spritz of warm air.

“So the cows end up being very calm,” Mesman said. “They’re all kind of on their own schedule and they all kind of wander around in their own little world out there. Yeah, it’s a pretty nice way to run the place.”

The robots have also made farms more productive. “We’ve gone up at least 10 percent,” Bouma said. “Yeah, it does great things for production.”

Bouma’s two robots handle all the milking on their own -- though they alert him when a human touch is needed.

“It loves texting!” he laughs. Bouma will get a text message if there’s a problem. “Whether the cow’s been in there too long or there’s too much milk. A cow may have kicked the machine and pulled off a teat cup,” he says. “It’s built pretty ruggedly, though, there’s not much the cows can do to it.”

Mesman says one big advantage with robots is he’s no longer tied to the farm.

“We have two very large apps that are on Android smart phones. My son was in Aruba and he just logged in from the hotel computer in the lobby in Aruba and sorted cows. Wasn’t even in the country.”  

It also means Mesman’s computer-savvy son, Ben Mesman, is looking forward to going into dairying.

“Now I have a little more free time to do what I want or see friends or spend time with my wife, so it’s definitely helpful that I get to be out and about a little more than stuck on the dairy 15 hours a day,” Ben Mesman said.

Janis DeJager echoes Ben Mesman’s hopes.

“I’m an eighth-generation dairy farmer. I hope to be an eighth-generation dairy farmer!” she laughed. “I want to grow into the dairy industry in which I was born and raised and grew up in.”

DeJager plans to go to college and then work on her parents’ farm. Innovations like robots may help make that possible, as much as that astounds Alan Mesman. 

“I know my grandpa, he hand milked until he was in his early 40s. So to go all the way from hand milking in a barn with a wooden floor to robotic milking is quite a stretch,” he said.

Robotic milkers are common in other parts of the world, with about 10,000 in use throughout Europe and Canada. Now, in Washington, six dairy farms are introducing this new technology into an old-fashioned way of life.