Udder way to go
CHICORA — A cow steps up, and a mechanical arm reaches under its udders.
A camera mounted on the arm shines a red light on its targets. The machine knows exactly which cow it's about to fondle. It knows, down to the second, the last time the two of them had such an encounter, exactly how much product each particular teat had offered up and precisely how long it took its suctioning hose to suck out all its milk.
Davis Dairy, a dairy farm in Chicora, has Butler County's only automated cow milking robots, the Davis family believes.
Removing the human element from the milking process may sound wrong to the classic dairy farmer, but advocates for machines like the one employed at Davis Dairy argue that it frees cows from the one-sized-fits-hundreds monotony of typical modern dairy farming. Alan Davis said he believes the machines are nicer for the cows.
“Before you had to milk all the cows twice a day, all at the same time,” he said. “This is a machine that runs around the clock. It gives the cows the freedom to milk whenever they want.”
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If everything in the Davis barn works perfectly, the cows can go about their business without needing human help. They sleep in rows atop pillowy mounds that can accurately be described as waterbeds. When a cow wants to eat, it rises from its bed and begins walking through a closed loop around the barn to the feed supply.
To get there, each cow passes into a gated area with two possible routes. If they're due for a milking, the gates direct them toward the robots. Otherwise, they pass through to eat.
Forget mooing for a helping human hand — if the cows get itchy, they can walk up and bump into a large brush that looks straight out of an automatic carwash. The machine starts spinning the brush and rotating it around the cow's body.
The loop runs constantly day and night, summer and winter. The Davis family first installed the current set up in 2015.
They didn't set out to perpetually lock cows up in a barn, but the animals generally opt to stay inside in the cool barn on their waterbeds, according to Alex Davis. At first, the Davises left open a gate to allow grazing in the field, but now open it only when there's a nice, cool period for grazing. The barn is somewhat climate controlled.
The robots also give the farm's humans a little extra wiggle room, Alex Davis said. “They're a big improvement,” he said. “They freed up a lot of time.”
It took some time to get the cows accustomed to the machine, Alan Davis explained. Some stubborn few still need to be milked the old fashioned way.
But of the family's 130 milking cows, most are milked by a robot an average of 2.5 times a day. It takes a robot an average of seven minutes to finish the job.
The system saves a tremendous amount of man-hours. Milking the herd previously took three people about eight hours. Today, just one person can handle all the regular upkeep duties in about six to eight hours while the robots do their thing.The farm ships its milk to Marburger's Farm Dairy in Evans City.The Davis family uses DeLaval voluntary milking systems. Such systems, while novel, aren't really a new invention. DeLaval revealed its first prototype in 1992, according to the company's website, and sold its first machines in 1993. Some farms elsewhere in the country, Alan Davis noted, are deploying dozens of robots, each capable of handling about 60 cows.Still, the mechanical, milk-sucking robo-arm draws attention from those who are unfamiliar.The Butler County Farm Bureau's annual legislative tour made a stop at the Davis Dairy farm in mid-August to see the machines in action.Evelyn Minteer, the bureau's information director, said the tour was well represented this year. Those attending the tour of the Davis farm included staff members for various elected officials including U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, State Sen. Elder Vogel, U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe and state Sen. Don White, according to the tour's guest list. All three Butler County commissioners attended.Besides the machine, a computer in the room next to the robots is perhaps the most unusual feature. The system produces dozens of reports. Spreadsheets for each cow are filled with data labeled with things like “expected yield” and “time since last milking.”Alan Davis said that system is a big benefit. They're able to spot disease quicker, he said, and they're aware of even more intricate details of their cattle's udders.“There's information on the computer we still don't know how to properly put to use,” he said.As with all computerized technology, sometimes things go wrong. The milking machines take robo-calls to the next level: If a robot needs human maintenance, it will call the farmers' phones and tell them what's wrong using a computerized voice.It's just another level of machine imitating man — and like the robotic milking, it comes at least fairly close.“It's kinda robotic, but it sounds pretty close to a person,” Alan Davis said.
