Good, bad of automation

PAYNESVILLE, Minn. — Producers undecided about automation recently had the opportunity to learn the good and bad from dairy producers who had already made the switch.

During the “Milking Robots: Are they the future?” meeting Feb. 26 at Shady’s 55 Pub & Event Center in Paynesville, owners and employees of three dairy farms shared their experiences integrating robotic milking units.

“One big difference, when we were in the parlor (was) we used to push the cows,” said Stephen Roerick, one of the producer panelists. “Now (with the robots) we walk around the cows.”

Roerview Dairy, near Upsala, is owned and operated by Roger and Diane Roerick and their sons — Craig and his wife, Sarah, and Stephen and his wife, Amanda. They built their milking barn in 2015 with three robotic milking units.

Merryville Farm LLC near Waverly, is owned by brothers Bill and Steve Uter. In 2020, they added four robots to the front of their existing freestall barn. Their barn is a guided flow. They milk their fresh cows, heifers and sick cows in a parlor.

Green Waves Farm near St. Micheal, Minnesota, is owned by David Berning and his dad, Mark. They built their barn in 2015 with  four robotic milking units. In 2017, they decided to expand and now have eight robotic milking units. They have four rows of pens with the robots on one side of each pen. The design is the same on each side of the barn. They pre-train their heifers roughly 2-3 weeks prior to calving.

“The cow has to be comfortable standing in the robot, then she has to learn to go in on her own,” Berning said. “Then she has to learn to be nice while she’s in there. If we can accomplish the first two before she calves, it’s not that big of a change for her when it comes time to start milking.”

When looking at the robot information, Roerview Dairy watches milkings per cow, refusals, total visits, milking components and bunk management. Roerview Dairy and Merryville Farm have made a point to watch solids production per cow per day.

“We’ve really geared ourselves towards managing components,” Craig said. “We don’t get too worked up about the total pounds of milk we are producing out of the barn.”

When it comes to robotic milking unit maintenance, all three farms do as much of their own maintenance on the robots as they can, aside from scheduled maintenance.

“We try not to call out the technicians,” Stephen said. “A part on the back shelf will save you a lot of down time.”

Berning agreed.

“(Robot calls) are not that big of a deal, if you take care of your equipment; it should work the way it needs to,” Berning said. “Take care of your things and they will take care of you.”

Each farm has different management tactics for hoof care. Each farm has a foot bath, but they are located in different parts of the barn — either right out of the robot or on the opposite side of the robots. 

Berning bought a used chute and trained himself how to trim hooves. They still have a scheduled hoof trimmer, but when they get a lame cow, he can fix the problem right away. He also can use this for drying off certain cows.

“One challenge with robots that you might not think of is drying off cows can be a bit of a pain,” Berning said. “They’re not used to being touched by human hands.”

The panelists also talked about labor with robots. Though their farms look different, they said robots do not take away all the labor for milking cows, they just change what is being done.

“Instead of milking cows for eight hours, we’re focusing on other areas to improve our cows,” Berning said. “It’s not necessarily less labor, but it gives some flexibility.”

Uter agreed.

“It’s your management style, whatever you put into it you’re going to get out of it,” Uter said.

During the panel, an audience member asked about milking first lactation cows in the robots and how they handle them.

“Heifers are kind of like kids; they all have different personalities,” Stephen said.

Berning agreed.

He said, some heifers are two-person jobs. However, the difference is employees are not going to be getting kicked like they maybe would in the parlor. Berning said he has noticed they have been able to milk more first milking heifers with one person since pretraining their heifers.

“The benefit (of pretraining) is for the transition of the cow and the people,” Berning said. “If we can have 90% of our heifers get milked with one person, I think that’s a big benefit.”

When the Roericks put their robotic milking units in, they were told the transition has different phases: three days, three weeks and three months. The first three days are hard. After three weeks, the process goes pretty well. And after three months, producers understand why the system was put in.

Each panelist said they were glad they put in robots.

“The robots, whether they’re green, purple, blue or red, they’re going to milk cows,” Berning said. “We all do things a little differently. That’s kind of the cool thing about the dairy industry.”