Happy cow, happy life: Robots relieve dairy farmers of a round-the-clock task
Clad in shorts and rubber boots, Kayla Coehoorn hoses down the concrete in her family’s dairy barn. She scatters sweet-smelling feed. Soon she’ll go outside to help her father chop hay for winter.
One thing she won’t do is milk cows. Ms. Coehoorn manages the family’s dairy herd, which until last year meant getting up at 5 for the morning milking, then milking again in the evening. Her father and grandfather did it before her. It’s a routine still followed on small dairy farms across the country.
Not here anymore. Last year the family built a new barn equipped with a pair of robotic milking machines. The machines milk cows around the clock,
