Robots Are Milking Cows?

The world of dairy farming has come a long way since Anna Baldwen from New Jersey patented her “Hygienic Glove Milker” in 1879.

The cows hated it and would often kick over the milk bucket.

But her rudimentary handheld mechanized pump heralded a new era in technology.

Farmers today are braced for another revolution. Large herds of cows are, for the first time, being milked by robots, thanks to Afimilk, based at Kibbutz Afikim, northern Israel.

In 1979, Afimilk launched the world’s first “milk meter” – which measures the yield of each individual cow, senses when the milking is over, checks for health issues and collects a mass of data that has transformed the way dairy farms operate.

It is now disrupting the dairy industry again, with the first robotic milking solution suitable for medium-sized farms — those with 500 to 5,000 cows.

Big farms (the world’s biggest has 160,000 cows) use industrial rotary milking parlors, in which the cows are rotated around a central platform, allowing each one to be milked in sequence.

Small farms, which are common in Europe, are dispensing with the routine of milking cows three times a day. Since as far back as the late 1990s many of them have been using milking robots.

The cows decide for themselves when they need milking, and the robot obliges. It frees the owners of small herds from having to be there three times a day for milking.

But neither of these solutions is practical or workable for a medium-sized farm.

The robots that small farms use aren’t scalable. “For 120 cows it’s a very good solution,” says Oren Drori, Afimilk’s VP Product. “For 600 dairy cows it’s pretty difficult. For 2,000 cows it’s impossible.”

Keep reading at israel21c.org.

Afimilk COO Gil Solovey is a Technion alumnus.