Angel Hernandez works on milking cows in the milking parlor at Darron and Miandra Schoen’s dairy farm north of Freistatt.
Like every other business in the computer age, dairy farming has seen extraordinary changes in the last 15 years.
Darron Schoen, a third generation dairy farmer north of Freistatt, even helped move that process forward.
Schoen and his wife, Miandra, raise cattle, milk cows and grow forage on the same farm started by his grandfather, Ewald Schoen, and subsequently run by his father, Edgar, for the next 40 years. The operation still milks 120 cows a day, mostly handled by Schoen’s employee, Angel Hernandez, who gets an occasional helping hand from his mother, Martha Hernandez.
The high-tech elements of the operation are not that visible. Darron will pull out his smartphone, type in the ear tag number of one of his cows, and view the family and medical history of the cow or calf. The Schoen farm was one of two in the nation that served as beta testers for the program.
The Schoens upgraded their dairy barn from milking six at a time to 15 in 2008. With 130 cows at the time, it took 12 hours a day. Now Hernandez can milk 75 to 90 cows an hour.
“Right now, we’re blessed to have really good hired help,” Schoen said. “That’s really hard to find. While they’re milking, we do other things. Before that, we’d do all the milking. Talk about being married to the farm.”
Darron and Miandra like to hunt deer. During hunting season, he said they would milk from 10 p.m. to 10 a.m. to get the chance to escape to the hunting fields.
The Schoens listened with interest when Duane Ripperda, from Arentsen Farm Sales in Illinois, spoke at the recent Monett Dairy Day about robotic milking. Over the past five years, the Lely company, based in Pella, Iowa, has produced 17,000 robots at work in 14 countries.
Ripperda described how cows will push past farmers to get to the milking station, where they can eat a high energy pellet — described as “cow candy” — and be milked at the same time.
Use of the robots allow dairy producers to typically see a 15 percent increase in milk production because they can milk three times a day, Ripperda said. The robot milks faster, keeps the cows calm and checks 120 health points at the same time. Robots can alert dairy producers of a cow reaching readiness for breeding within a four-to-six hour window.
Darron said the Dairy Herd Improvement Association comes to his farm once a month and provides him with similar information, down to the cow’s weight, somatic cell count, butterfat and protein content of the milk. The milk sample can even show if an artificially inseminated cow is pregnant.
Milking systems have generally become more sophisticated. Darron’s system does not activated the vacuum until placed on the cow, and will sense when the milk flow is decreasing, then turn itself off.
According to Ripperda, the sale of robots is doubling each year. The only farm in Missouri using them is in Washington, which added its third robot last year. Each robot handles about 65 to 70 cows, but can milk 100 cows twice a day. The largest concentration of robots are in colder states, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota, and in Canada.
“Every farmer I’ve sold one to said there cows would leave before the robot,” Ripperda said. “It will change your life.”
“I’d love to have one,” Darron said, “but the economy of the dairy industry since 2009 has been ‘wait and see.’ Now it’s not so bad. On paper, I can see how to do it, and a large part would pay for itself.
“I’ve been watching it for a lot of years. I’m going to wait for the price to drop. Technology comes down in price.”
A single robot, installed with webinars offered for training, costs $250,000, down from the initial $1 million. Ripperda said Lely makes annual service calls and can handle most maintenance issues over the phone. Once off warranty, robot costs run about $5,000 a year. Energy costs are roughly comparable to traditional dairy parlors. Each robot uses about 80 to 100 gallons a day of water for washing.
Darron said he had heard of other high-tech systems in the works. One system, based in a box in the dairy barn, monitors cows in the pasture, tracking everything from eating habits to stomach behavior, providing alerts in case of sudden changes or illness. The information is transmitter from an ear tag to the box, which uploads the data to “the cloud,” making it accessible by phone or computer. The ear tag system encountered difficulties and it is not yet on the market, Darron said, though another version using a collar for cows is being sold.
“I’d be glad to help test the system,” he said.
Darron said he and his father often sit around and wonder out loud what Darron’s grandfather, who died in 1991, would have thought of today’s technology.
“I often talk with Dad about what Grandpa would think of GPS telling us to move the tractor one inch to the left,” Darron said.
The Schoens plan to keep watching the technology frontier and adding to their resources as they can.
More information about robotic milking systems is available online at Lely.com
Source: Monett-Times
