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Robotic milking the future according to Nuffield scholar Dairy farmer Paul Lambert had a pretty simple goal after being awarded a 2011 Nuffield Scholarship – to try and make the Tasmanian dairy industry, in his words, “a little better”. With that aim in mind, Paul quickly came to the conclusion that robotic milking would fit the bill, and that became the principle focus of his study. “It sounds interesting, it’s a bit like Star Wars maybe, or something more modern, but really the concept is you don’t have staff milking cows, it’s basically totally automatic. So it’s quite a great thing to see happening and it’s quite well proven throughout the world.” While to the average person the idea of robotic milking might sound complicated and difficult, Paul says his observations from overseas dispute that notion. “Certainly over the years it’s become much easier, the current system consists of a large box which a cow walks into and she’s fed some grain and while that’s happening a big arm comes underneath her that’s all electronic and has got lots of sensors on it and cleans teats and dries them and actually individually milks each quarter of the cow all at once. It does a very good job, probably better than a human hand.” Paul explains. As for concerns about robots handling cows, Paul, who milks 700 cows at Merseylea in northern Tasmania, says the technology means it’s simply not an issue. “It’s absolutely safe for the cow, some of the materials they’re using are stainless steel and carbon fibre and things like that, very lightweight and probably fairly forgiving – the machine is unlikely to hurt the cow, more maybe the cow hurting it I think would be more likely.“ Paul found the best adoption of the technology in Europe, particularly in Holland and up into Denmark, explaining “in Denmark more than half their cows are milked through robots and in Holland just under half their cows are milked through robots and combined they are quite a bit larger than the Australian dairy industry. In fact Holland is slightly larger just by itself, so there is a lot of cows, a lot of milk, all going through robots.” Paul says while the price of establishing robotic dairies has been prohibitive for Australian dairies, he believes that is set to change. “I reckon we’re only a few years away from seeing some large scale set-ups of purely robotic dairies – the price has been at a point where things have been a little bit difficult to do something in Australia but after travelling through Europe and finding that things are a whole lot cheaper over there than what we’ve been led to believe here, I’m quite confident that we’ll see some things happening in the not too distant future. Importantly for the local labour force, Paul says while replacing humans with robots may seem bad for farming communities, that won’t be an issue. “I don’t actually think that we’ll see a loss of labour, what we’ll see is larger herds being milked by the same number of people. Also, in farming you tend to have a labour structure that works best where there’s probably one leader with up to half a dozen people directly under that person, so to maintain
