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UCCE advisor Bruno guides, learns from dairies switching to milking robots
Automatic milking systems increasingly used in California amid labor challenges
When third-generation dairy farmer Shonda Reid first saw a milking robot at a farm show 13 years ago, she immediately recognized that the technology represented the future. Her father, however, took a bit more convincing.
“I came home and showed him and said, ‘This is what we need to do.' And he thought I was kidding!” said Reid, dairy and farm manager for Fred Rau Dairy, which has a herd of 1,400 milk cows in Fresno County.
Years later, after the family had visited several dairies using automatic milking systems (AMS) across the U.S., they installed their first six robots in November 2021. By fall 2022, they had 24 robots, evenly split between two newly built “free stall” barns where the cows can freely go to the milking machines.
As Fred Rau Dairy was one of the first in California to implement AMS at such a scale, Reid and her team have been instrumental in growing practical knowledge on these systems. She also has been a valued partner to Daniela Bruno, University of California Cooperative Extension dairy advisor for Fresno, Madera and Kings counties.
“Automatic milking robots are not a new technology, but it's new to California,” said Bruno, noting that the milking robots were first used on small, family-run farms in Europe, where the technology granted family members more time for rest and other pursuits.
To better understand the feasibility of milking robots for large dairies in California, Bruno – alongside former UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine professor Fernanda Ferreira, University of Minnesota researcher Marcia Endres and other collaborators – began a project in 2020 to study the risks and opportunities of automated systems.
“The information is extremely useful for California producers to make informed decisions about implementing AMS on their facilities,” said Denise Mullinax, executive director of the California Dairy Research Foundation, which supported the effort through a competitive grant. “Cow care, labor requirements and profitability are key issues for producers, and CDRF was pleased to support this project which assists producers in understanding how AMS may impact those areas on their facility.”
Dairy farmer: ‘We needed to make some changes'
The project produced a paper analyzing existing research on automatic systems, which have been more widely used in the Midwest, where there are more small-scale, family-run dairies. In 2020, there were only 14 “box robots” in California, according to Bruno. Now there are about 200 across California – and both Bruno and Reid cited labor challenges as the primary reason for the increased use of automated systems.
“California suffers from labor quality and quantity issues,” Bruno said. “By bringing robots to California, you can minimize those problems.”
Higher costs of hiring and retaining employees, driven in part by new labor laws, are one factor. And then there's the reliability and availability of labor, as fewer people are willing to do the physically demanding work of conventional milking.
“People just don't want to milk in a flat barn [a conventional setup where the employee works at the same level as the cow] – there's a lot of kneeling, squatting, that type of thing – it's pretty tough on the body,” Reid explained.
Faced with labor shortages and mounting regulatory burdens, Reid said Fred Rau Dairy had to make the leap to automated systems to keep the 80-year-old dairy operation running.
“We needed to make some changes, or we're going out of the dairy business,” she said.
In a survey conducted by Bruno and her colleagues of large dairies using AMS across the U.S., a majority of the 29 respondents reported reductions in labor costs – but survey results did not offer a definitive picture on whether AMS improved bottom-line profitability.
Calmer, healthier cows
Nevertheless, most of the survey respondents said they were generally happy with their transition to automatic systems.
“It's totally met our expectations, and cow health has gotten much better, too,” Reid said.
In a typical conventional system where cows are outside in “open corral” pens, dairy employees must cajole the cows into the milking parlor. But within a “free stall” barn where the cows can voluntarily go to the milking robots when they want, as often as they want, the animals are much less stressed.
“When you think about cow handling, if you have robots, you don't have anybody pushing and screaming at them to walk to the parlor,” Bruno explained. “You have less cow-people interaction so they are more calm; there is less stress.”
In the survey of large dairies using milking robots, more than 90% of the respondents said their cows were calmer. Reid also noted that many people have noticed how calm their cows are in the free stall barns.
“They're not skittish, you can walk in and they don't run,” Reid said. “They'll just watch you or they'll even come up and start licking on your jacket or shirt.”
Bruno also said that many of the large dairies reported fewer cases of mastitis and other diseases, less lameness, and greater milk production. But she added it's hard to know whether the benefits can be attributed to the robots and their real-time monitoring technology – or to changes in the physical environment (cows save energy in the free stall barn setup, versus the open-corral system that requires walking to the milking parlor).
Dairy producers seek counsel on potential transition
Less bovine travel from outside to inside was a boon for Fred Rau Dairy during last year's unusually wet winter.
“Even if it's just a couple of weeks of rain, that mud and manure and everything – you do what you can, but oh my gosh – it's a mess,” said Reid, noting that easier facility maintenance during extreme weather was another benefit of switching to automatic systems within free stall barns.
Reid shared many of her experiences with attendees of an AMS Field Day in October 2022, arranged by Bruno, Ferreira and their collaborators. About 60 farmers, researchers, industry representatives and consultants visited Fred Rau Dairy and Jones Dairy in Merced County.
If a dairy producer is considering implementing automatic systems, Reid recommends that they research all their options, visit dairies that use the systems, and check who in their area would be providing service and technical support.
And there are crucial workforce considerations, as dairy workers must learn an entirely new set of skills and processes. Instead of spending their time fetching the cows, prepping them and milking them in the parlor, workers might need to gather and interpret data from the robots. “Cow people,” as Reid puts it, must become computer people.
“You have a group of people who have been with you for a while, and you hope that they can transition to the new technology of what you're doing,” Reid said.
During this technological transition, and on the myriad other challenges that dairy operators face, Reid said she is grateful for Bruno's expertise and responsiveness.
“If there's something that I need, she's been really good about trying to help – or putting me in contact with the right people,” she explained. “I've enjoyed working with her.”
The AMS project team also includes UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine professor Fabio Lima, postdoctoral researcher Thaisa Marques and former postdoctoral researcher Camila Lage.
Fall is best time to clean nest boxes for barn owls
Research shows land managers should clean nest boxes in autumn to avoid disturbing the raptors
When it comes to American barn owls, forget spring cleaning.
The best time of year to clean out nest boxes to ready them for breeding pairs is the fall months of September through November, according to research out of the University of California, Davis, that analyzed nearly a century of banding and other records.
In a paper published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, researchers found that the median egg laying date for barn owls (Tyto furcata) in California is Feb. 20, so cleaning nest boxes in the fall is recommended.
“The risk is you could disrupt a nest that has already started,” said lead author Ryan Bourbour, a Ph.D. candidate in ecology in the Department of Animal Science at the time of the study. “We want to reduce disturbances to nesting pairs even in the weeks prior to egg laying.”
American barn owls offer a natural way for land managers and agricultural operations to control pests, because the raptors eat mice, gophers and rats. One breeding pair can consume up to 2,000 rodents annually, according to the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
But natural tree cavities and old barn structures are not as plentiful as they once were, so installing nest boxes can attract the barn owls. And land managers who spend money installing these “nest box networks” have long asked about the best time of year to do maintenance and cleaning. Planning cleaning and maintenance well before the start of the breeding season is “part of making that nest box worthwhile,” Bourbour said.
Pellets add up
After eggs hatch, nestlings spend their early days eating and living in the nest boxes until they are able to leave the nest, said Breanna Martinico, another paper author and an animal science Ph.D. candidate in ecology.
The nestling period of roughly 65 days is considered long.
“That's two months where owls are living and growing exclusively in that nest box,” said Martinico, who is also a UC Cooperative Extension human-wildlife interactions advisor in Napa, Lake and Solano counties.
As many as five or six nestlings are typically in a box, and they eat up to four or five rodents each day. Nestlings swallow their prey whole, and what isn't digested — fur and bones — is coughed up in round or oval-like pellets.
“They're in there for seven to eight weeks just regurgitating these pellets,” Bourbour said. “A lot of pellets pile up over the course of a breeding season and a lot of these boxes need to be cleaned out.”
From anecdotal to data
Discussions about how early the breeding season starts have mostly been anecdotal. To get a better picture, the paper's authors analyzed 96 years of banding records from the United States Geological Survey Bird Banding Lab and 39 years of intake records from California Raptor Center at UC Davis. Both databases helped them estimate the typical egg laying time of year in California, Martinico said.
Having this information can help land managers ensure maintenance is done and nest boxes are safe for the next breeding pair, helping barn owl populations while also benefiting agricultural operations.
“We can give them tools to manage barn owl nest box networks effectively and maximize pest control through owls,” Martinico said.
Additional co-authors include Emily Phillips, Jessica Schlarbaum and Joshua Hull in the Department of Animal Science, Michelle Hawkins in the Department of Medicine and Epidemiology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and Sara Kross from Columbia University.
Funding came from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture's Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program.
The journal article is entitled Banding records of nestling barn owls reveal optimal timing for nest box maintenance in California.
Veterinarians Registering Now for UC Davis-OSU Honey Bee Health Course
If you're a veterinarian or a veterinary technician in California or Oregon, then you'll want to...
Inside a hive. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
UC helps California dairy farmers experiment with milking robots
The technological developments were critical to the formation of California's enormous dairy industry, the largest in the nation. Today, more than 1.7 million cows produce 39.8 billion pounds of milk in California each year, according to the California Milk Advisory Board.
The march of progress continues. The state's dairy industry is now beginning to integrate robots and sophisticated computer software into cow barns to maintain the supply of wholesome and inexpensive dairy foods for Americans. UC Cooperative Extension scientists are poised to help them adapt to the new technologies.
On most California dairies, cows are led two or three times each day from the barn to the milking parlor by workers. They clean the cows' udders to remove bacteria and surface dirt, evaluate whether the cow has mastitis, attach the milking machines, and disinfect the cow's teats after milking before taking the cows back to their pens.
“Dairy production is automated, but it is still a very labor intensive activity,” said Fernanda Ferreira, UC Cooperative Extension dairy specialist based at the UC Veterinary Medicine Teaching and Research Center in Tulare. “Farmers always tell us that the most challenging thing they are facing is labor – labor availability, training and cost.”
Milking robots – a technology already being used in dairies in the Midwest and Eastern U.S., Europe, South America and Canada – promises greater automation, reduced labor needs and improved animal welfare.
View a short video clip of the milking robot in action.
The machines don't resemble a stereotypical robot character, but rather are computerized boxes large enough to fit one cow, with a robot arm programmed to reach under the cow and clamp onto the teats. Cows do not need to be led to the milking machine, but rather walk into the box voluntarily when they are ready to be milked.
The machine recognizes each individual cow by a computer tag around her neck or on the ear, and provides personalized milking service. The robots do all the work: clean the teats, attach the milking machines, and disinfect the teats after the milking is done. While milking, the robot collects data on the cow's output and health.
When it comes to California and all the West, these are very new,” Ferreira said. “We're talking herds that have 1,800 cows on average. Huge herds. Since each of the robotic units, which serve 60 to 70 cows, costs about $120,000, we're also talking about a huge investment.”
Two San Joaquin Valley dairies have already installed milking robots, and many others are interested in the new technology. Ferreira and other researchers from the VMTRC in Tulare are collaborating with one of them to study how the machine and the herd's management can be adapted to better serve large-scale dairy herds like those in California.
“Our idea is to first understand the perspective of the producers who have cows being milked by robots. We want to know what they have learned so far, the challenges they have encountered, their relationship with banks,” Ferreira said. “Relationships with banks are important because most dairies will need to borrow funds to equip their facilities with enough robots for full automation.”
Future research will review issues of milk quality, mastitis management and determine what data farmers will need from the computerized system to improve dairy profitability.
“There are a lot of options available from companies that manufacture the robots. We want to fully understand how they work for our farmers and cows to be able to inform the future of California's dairy industry,” Ferreira said.
'Beekeeping and Management' Part of UC Davis Veterinary Medicine's Winter Conference
Mark your calendar! "Beekeeping and Management" will be part of the two-day UC Davis School of...
A honey bee colony at work. Extension apiculturist Elina Niño will discuss three topics dealing with "Beekeeping and Management" at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine's 2019 winter conference. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Extension apiculturist Elina Lastro Niño opening a hive at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
