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Bloomberg
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 US, 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 signalling that labour could be even harder to come by. Robots can cut the number of workers on a dairy farm by 50 percent.
Along with labour worries, cheap credit and improvements in technology are coming together to tip the scales in favour 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.
“You don’t want to wake up one morning and have a thousand cows to milk and not have the labour to do that.â€
Currently, fewer than 5 percent of US 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 report by IDTechEx.
Rising costs of labour will also continue to drive farms towards automation, according to Bruce Dehm, whose company Dehm Associates in Geneseo, New York, analyses the financial performance of dairies.