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The cow knows best when to be milked

Bobbie Johnson© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Robotic, voluntary milking systems for them, albeit expensive, arrive

LONDON: The life of a dairy farmer is long hours and hard graft: awake before dawn, working all day long and unable to rest until the cows come home. But things are changing, thanks to a technology that hands control of the milking process over to an unusual agency — the cows themselves.

Robotic Voluntary Milking Systems, which are increasingly popular, let cows decide when they need to be milked, rather than submitting them to the grind of twice-daily milking that is the routine on most dairy farms. The technology has been pioneered by Dutch engineers, who say it is the perfect solution to farming's cow conundrum.

Milking robots cost about £60,000 each in the United Kingdom (about Rs.48 lakhs), and have been rolled out at hundreds of farms in the United States and Europe.

Electronic tags

The cows wear electronic tags and when they decide they need milking — about six or seven times a day — they enter the shed and are identified by the system.

As they line up to be milked, a laser-guided robot locates the cow's udder and then latches on to its teats. Developers say that it is easy for cows to grasp the basic mechanics of the system, and letting them control the milking schedules actually increases their productivity.

It is a revolution that's been gathering pace since the first VMS machines were built in the late 1990s.

"More and more farmers are choosing an automatic system," says a manager with DeLaval, and the figures bear him out: his company sold more than 300 milking robots in the first half of this year.

Critics of mass farming say that although voluntary systems are more humane than traditional methods, they do little to alleviate the real problems with factory methods.

But few doubt that giving the animals control over when they are milked is a step forward.

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