Milking Robot: Fill & Download for Free

Farm kids celebrate. No more waking up pre-dawn to milk and feed the cows. Cow-milking robots have arrived.Let’s presume for a moment that you aren’t someone who thinks a great deal about dairy farming. Like me, for example. You (or I) may think you have this idea about what it means to milk a cow. For me, it was always something akin to what Harrison Ford did in Witness—wake up at o-dark-thirty, sit on a stool, and work a cow’s teat until you filled a bucket with milk.For starters, the A4 does not require a human being at any point in the milking process, leaving farmers free to cook dinner, work the books, or play Parcheesi. That’s because no one has to move a cow into the milking box. The animal goes there on its own because it knows there is feed there (the cows are fed traditionally, but the A4 contains higher-protein food, and cows are really good at knowing what they’re eating and, more important, what they want to eat). The front of the box has a trough where a cow can eat a measured amount of grain while it’s being milked.The A4 scans a cow’s collar to determine which cow it is. The machine has a full history of that cow’s milk production and feeding habits, based on previous visits, and can tailor the amount of feed the cow receives and the rate of pulsation at the teat to produce the most milk.As the milk is collected, it is analyzed to make sure the milk—and the cow—is healthy. This is done in a variety of ways: by analyzing the color of the milk, measuring its flow, and measuring its electrical conductivity, which can be an indication of inflammation or some other problem the cow is having. (Inflammation equals increased blood flow. Blood has minerals in it. Minerals are conductive. Voilà.)[1][1] The $210,000 Cow-Milking Robot

I’m currently working as a dairy farm manager in 900 cow herd. Half of the herd is kept in farm with milking parlour, the other half - in farm with milking robots.Previously I have been working as a veterinarian on another dairy farm and afterwards as a dairy nutritionist on feed company.From my observations only very few people are capable to work closely with animals (especially if there are is a herd of them).You have be able to predict cow behaviour and to keep calm when they are stressed out. Most people are losing their tempers if animal is not behaving according to their expectations.You have to be able to tolerate lots of manure, blood, bodily discharges and even deaths. Over time you get used to it (which is not a good thing as it numbs your perception of animal discomfort and suffering).In large herds cows are not pets, they are milk machines. If a cow gets sick, a farmer will calculate how much he will earn after she would get treatment. Otherwise the cow will be culled immediately.It is no a place for people with sensitive perception and high morals. This work is both mentally and physically draining.Yet I see it as interesting and challenging enviroment - if I am able to organize the work correctly, the cows are more healthy, they produce more milk and they are easier to handle.

Everyone has missed this: old-fashioned milk.From circa 1910 until the end of the 1960’s, milk in the USA was pasteurised for 30 minutes at 145˚F . This was a pasteurising protocol developed and promoted by Public Health officials shortly after the turn of the century, in a bid to make pasteurised milk popular. At this temperature setting, the pathogens are killed off, but the wonderful rich flavour of the raw milk is barely affected.Then the supermarkets came along towards the end of the 60’s, and offered to buy gazillions of gallons of milk each year, but at the same time demanded cheaper price. They did NOT say to the industry, we want a better price but no loss in quality. Nope. So how do you make milk cheaper? Various ways, and they all contributed to the decline of the quality of milk. You can breed cows that produce more and more milk. You can keep the cows indoors all year round, and feed them on grains and molasses, etc instead of the grass they would normally want on their daily menu. You can get rid of small dairy farms, run by families that would look after their small herd almost like they were their own children. Make huge dairy farms, with 3,000 milking cows. Bring in robotic equipment, so you don’t have to pay a human being to look after the cows. Maybe milk the cows three times a day, and after 5 years, send the cow off to the butchers. (A cow can live on average 20 years, but some will live to be almost 30 if looked after.)But nothing is so important to making cheaper milk than to speed up the time involved in pasteurising it. And by having the target temperature at 163˚F instead of 145˚F the process is able to be 120 times faster. This is because at 163˚F the milk simply needs to run through pipework for 15 seconds. This is the protocol for pasteurising milk that has prevailed ever since the supermarkets came on the scene. Does this make a difference to the taste? You bet. Milk is a complex and delicate blend of hundreds of compounds, and every degree of temperature increase brings with it significant biochemical changes.My wife is a dairy farmer of the old school, on an island in Scotland. When we started bottling milk to sell to the local market - and in Scotland one must pasteurise the milk, by law - we tried the higher temperature approach one time. We tasted the milk, and swore that we would never do it twice..! The change in taste was shocking. And so we use the old protocol, and ours is the only commercial dairy in Scotland to do so. Again and again we get people who are 50+ years old commenting that “your milk tastes like the milk I used to have as a kid..!” It also won a major national Quality Food Award in 2017, in the Chilled Dairy division. (Due to our remote location we did not try entering any further contests in 2018.) We also do not homogenise the milk, and so left for a day or two in the fridge, the cream floats to the top.I know there are good dairies in North America. For example the Strauss family offer very good organic milk to the SF Bay Area, in good glass bottles. But having tasted it, I know they must pasteurise at 163˚F for 15 seconds instead of the old-fashioned protocol I have described above. In New York state there is a dairy farm that do use the older slow, low-temp protocol that we use. Here is a link to their site:Pittsford Farms Dairy & BakeryIn Canada there is one called Harmonies which is similar, and good. Not surprisingly, the number of commercial dairies in the USA or Canada which pasteurise at 145˚F for 30 minutes are very few. If you know of any, I’d be delighted to hear of them. But you can be sure that 99.9% of the American population haven’t tasted old-fashioned low-temperature batch pasteurised milk at any time in the past 40 years.By the way, our milk is popular with ex-pats from Eastern Europe who are working in Scotland, because (they tell us) our milk tastes like the milk back home. So the old way of doing it is still widely practised in many eastern European countries it would seem.Of course if getting the cheapest possible price for your milk is the sole criteria, then you are in luck, because that is what the supermarkets offer. White stuff rendered into an industrial product. Our milk isn’t cheap compared to the insane pricing you see in the supermarkets. But we know it is the best milk one can find.