The robots are coming — this time, to a dairy farm near you.
It wasn’t long ago that cow-milking robots were a novelty in the U.S., but today, automation is showing up on more farms.
One of the big factors spurring the trend: more than half of all workers on dairy farms are immigrants, and the Trump Administration’s hard-line policy stances are signaling that labor could be even harder to come by. Robots can cut the number of workers on a dairy farm by 50 percent.
Along with labor worries, cheap credit and improvements in technology are coming together to tip the scales in favor of robotics on dairy farms, said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
“We’ve even had people who’ve worked for years on some farms that left because they’re concerned about being picked up as undocumented,” Stephenson said by phone. “You don’t want to wake up one morning and have a thousand cows to milk and not have the labor to do that.”
Currently, fewer than 5 percent of U.S. dairy farms use robots. That number will probably increase by 20 percent to 30 percent a year for the foreseeable future, according to Chad Huyser, vice president for North America at Lely, a manufacturer of milking robots based in Pella, Iowa. Globally, robotics for dairy farming is already a $1.6 billion industry, a number that will continue to grow, according to a January report by market researcher IDTechEx.
While early models of robot milkers didn’t work as well, the technology has now become feasible and reliable, Stephenson said. Robots work by attaching equipment to cows’ udders, milking them and cleaning them.
In a popular model, cows walk up to a stall to get milked whenever they want, and one robot handles around 60 a day. Mechanization is showing up in other ways, too, with mobile robots pushing feed and cleaning up after animals.
It’s an expensive upgrade. One robotic unit can cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars, said Marcia Endres, a professor of dairy sciences at University of Minnesota who has done economic modeling on robotic milkers.
Still, if the machine lasts for about 15 years and if a farmer’s total costs for workers are about $25 to $30 an hour, those that install the technology can expect to break even in the end, she estimated.
“You’re prepaying your labor costs for seven to eight years, depending on the loan you get,” said Chad Kieffer, whose family dairy, Kiefland Holsteins in Utica, Minn., reduced labor on the farm by half after adding robotics. They have five robots that milk 300 cows.