How dairy robots are changing work for cows and farmers
65 comments
·April 15, 2025DonHopkins
jamesrcole
> These videos of robotic cow milking machines, feed mixers and distributers and pushers, and manure roombas are amazing!
These robots need to be named "moombas"
pvg
Pretty primitive stuff compared to SOTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZ4DnVfWYQ
darth_avocado
Maybe it’s the skeptic in me, but the dude’s jacket seems CGI
pvg
Like Nikolai said, network is not so good - compяession artifact.
tomcam
Wonderful comment and thanks for your gift to the lexicographical world of the word Poopoombas
Animats
These machines have been around for a while. There are at least nine companies selling them.[1] This started in Australia and New Zealand, which don't have much cheap labor.
There's a competing approach - robotic rotary milking.[2] Rotary milkers (giant turntables with cows on them) have been around for decades, and are becoming more automated, down from four people to one.
All this stuff works fine. So there's a huge milk glut.
[1] https://roboticsbiz.com/top-9-best-robotic-milking-machines/
bombledmonk
I toured a farm in the middle of nowhere in northern MN quite a 7 years ago with this exact system.
Laser Guided Teat Seeking Milker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTERLJDKsIw
Automatic Crane feed loading system for the Roomba-like robots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDEIcZwQa-o
Reverse Roomba-like automatic feeding robot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-QFB827U-M
unclad5968
It's cool that this allows the cows to be milked whenever they feel like it. I'd imagine the autonomy actually does improve the cow's quality of life. Also neat that they learned to game the feeding robot. It reminds me of the image recognition experiments they do with birds.
decimalenough
Serious question: why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life? The setup in the video looks far more expensive than what most dairies actually do, which is keeping cows tightly confined in stalls where they can't move at all.
astariul
My uncle has a farm, and at some point he installed a machine to hot-air dry the hay. Seemed like a huge investment to me, but turn out the cows love this hay way more than before, and therefore are producing significantly more milk, of higher quality. Higher quality milk means you can sell it more expensive.
So cow's quality of life increase the quality and the quantity of milk. Moreover most farmers I know would rather have happy animals, their living depends on them !
torlok
The robots that push the feed increase feed consumption thus yield. The cleaning robots prevent illnesses like hoof issues and mastitis, thus increasing yield. Milking the cow when it wants increases yield, as a cow can milk itself more than the regular 2 times per day. RFID tags on the cows allow the system to give extra feed to cows that produce more milk, which saved money and increases yield. The list goes on. A stressed out ill cow isn't profitable. Systems like these are widely used across Europe. They're not only profitable, but also incredibly convenient for the farmer.
HeyLaughingBoy
> why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life?
Believe it or not, most people who go into animal husbandry do so because they enjoy working with animals and care deeply about their welfare.
adrianN
The state of industrialized meat production seems to suggest the opposite.
AlotOfReading
It's not so much about animal welfare. If there's a trade-off to be made between economics and animal welfare, the economics usually win out. Cattle would prefer to graze low density pastures, for example, but that's not compatible with the economic realities of modern dairy and it ends up limited to an insignificant portion of the market. Robots and automation solve problems for both the livestock and the dairy, so they're common.
barbazoo
> why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life?
There is no such "thing" as "a dairy" that would or wouldn't care about something. It's all people making decisions and why wouldn't we strive to reduce suffering of other animals?!
decimalenough
Because reducing suffering would impact the bottom line? There's a whole slew of existing technology/practices (battery hens, debeaking, sow stalls, etc) that already prioritize profit over animal welfare.
Vegans also argue that the entire dairy industry, which necessarily requires keeping cows continually pregnant and separating them from their calves soon after birth, in itself creates immense suffering.
plantain
What countries keep cows in stalls? In Australia/NZ they free range...
emmelaich
Climate has something to do with that.
decimalenough
Per Wikipedia, 74% of Canadian and 39% of American dairy cows are.
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DonHopkins
The article claims that when the cows are free to roam around and get milked when they like, the produce more milk. And maybe there are human beings who care about working around happy cows, who knows? They're certainly a lot cleaner and healthier, and they all may enjoy that too.
It's the poor overworked abused Poopoomba robot with the worst job in the world whose happiness I worry about, though. They could do a lot of damage if they revolted. Maybe they could let them out to drive around in the fields vacuuming up cow plops at their own pace, free-range style.
DonHopkins
And how they had to inhibit greedy cows with the munchies from volunteering to be milked too often, just to get treats!
There are certain things you just can't predict, and have to learn in the field...
decimalenough
China famously now has "dark factories" where everything is automated, so lighting is not needed.
Guess this means we're about to have "dark dairies" where cows can be kept chained up in perpetual darkness, with robots doing the absolute minimum required to keep them alive, pregnant and producing milk.
I know this is not a particularly pleasant thought, but I'd like to hear counterarguments about why this wouldn't happen, since to me it seems market pressures will otherwise drive dairies in this direction.
(For what it's worth, I'm not a vegan, but a visit to a regular human-run dairy sufficiently confident in its practices to conduct tours for the public was almost enough to put me off dairy products for good.)
blargey
> Guess this means we're about to have "dark dairies"
You'll be pleasantly surprised by the article, then. These robots aren't conducive to automating the labor specific to factory farming.
More generally, the egg market in the US has gone from 4% cage-free in 2010 to 39.7% cage-free in 2024. Cows don't have a "non-factory" label but I don't see why one wouldn't be as successful.
HeyLaughingBoy
"Lights out manufacturing" has been a thing around the world for literally decades. This is not new. The main "problem" is feeding the machines enough raw material and removing finished parts so they can keep running without human intervention. Not surprisingly, there are now robots for that.
https://www.machinemetrics.com/blog/lights-out-manufacturing
As far as why your scenario wouldn't happen: why would it? You can dream up anything you like, doesn't mean it makes sense.
decimalenough
All things being equal, why would you pay for lighting if you don't need it?
foolfoolz
it’s mentioned many times in the linked article happy cows produce more milk
HeyLaughingBoy
The assumption that all things are equal is the issue I have with your argument.
djoldman
> And of course there’s manure. A dairy cow produces an average of 68 kilograms of manure a day. All that manure has to be collected and the barn floors regularly cleaned.
Ok that's a stat I didn't expect. 68kg! That's ~150lbs! Holy crap.
WorkerBee28474
Might be worth mentioning that half of that will be water content.
delecti
Does that matter? I'm not trying to be sarcastic or glib, does it help in any way that it's half water?
It's probably not an accurate comparison, but I don't find any consolation in the fact that a lot of the bulk/weight of cleaning my cat's litter box is water. I don't know if it meaningfully changes anything about the task for a cow though.
toddmatthews
its actually 70-90% water. it matters because water is very heavy, and whats left over will be dramatically less after it dries out.
its a large amount of waste, but its not 150lbs of solids
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stickfigure
Super interesting read! But also feels a bit like a paid advertisement. You'd think that an article about robot farms would mention more than one brand of robot? Guessing this is the submarine at work:
https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
It makes me wonder what the author isn't mentioning. Do they have bugs that take the whole farm down? If the internet goes out, do the machines start acting weird? I'm not a luddite, I love the idea of a robot farm, I just want a complete story.
thijson
This guy has been using the Lely feeder robots.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tdzo6cGVqU
He used to spend a lot of time feeding everyday.
surprise_
I live near row crops in CA. Every time I read anything like this about automation in agriculture… I can’t help but to think “if you can solve the problem for one row of crops, you can solve the problem for all the rows of crops”
gingkoguy
How come no one makes fun of agriculture in america ?
If we can successfully produce agricultural products in America why is manufacturing impossible?
newhotelowner
Very small % of our workforce works in the farm.
Also I think we manufactured a lot more things/value with a same number of people like 10 years ago but with mostly automated.
HeyLaughingBoy
This again!
We manufacture plenty in America. Every company that I've worked for over the last 30 years has manufactured something or the other. We just don't manufacture cheap stuff like toasters.
nwhnwh
Pathetic progress without people.
uwagar
whats happening to the cows is gonna happen to people too. thats where we are going folks.
These videos of robotic cow milking machines, feed mixers and distributers and pushers, and manure roombas are amazing!
Cows like to push and play with their food to get to the yummy grain bits, so the feed robot pushes the food back so they can eat it all.
And the Poopoombas had to learn to be more aggressive about pushing cows out of the way and not stopping every time they bumped or got kicked, because otherwise the cows would assign them the lowest status in the pecking order, and they could only cower in the corner.
Here are the videos from the article and some more:
The milking process of the Lely Astronaut A5 - EN:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-zYshsAg1E
Takes Dairy Farm Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZY8TbBoDd0
Zeta - how it works - EN - NL subtitles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17TA-lI_oqQ
Zeta - Vision film - EN - NL subtitles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nRaj16tPLc
Their web site has a pretty cool "page not found" error page too:
https://www.lely.com/moo
Now dairy farms can use two different kinds of AI together! ;) They could develop an insemination module to go with their calving module.
https://www.lely.com/solutions/latest-innovations/zeta/ai-ca...
I wonder if you can rent swarms of these and dispatch them to anywhere you need them:
https://www.lely.com/solutions/manure/discovery-collector/
Or if you can use them in reverse, loading them up them dumping shit wherever you wanted to, like a giant Logo Turdle, in the name of art and science.