With wide-eyed fascination, numerous farmers and other visitors continuously toured the new robotic Stateline Dairy north of Morrowville, Kansas, during an open house June 8, held in conjunction with Dairy Month.
The massive new barn, extending 700 feet long and 100 feet houses 600 cows that file through its 10 robotic milkers at the facility on Highway 15, two miles south of the Nebraska border. The dairy is part of the Ohlde Family Farm in Linn, Kansas, which relocated the first set of 300 cows to this new facility in late 2022. They added 300 heifers and bought other cows to reach a total of 600 on-site at 2779 King Road.
“A year and a half ago, this building – which was a beef confinement facility, came up for sale and it was an opportunity,” said Justin Ohlde, one of the family partners, “But there’s no parlor here so there was nowhere to milk the cows. That’s when the idea for the robotic milkers came up.”
Eager to visit a robotic dairy in action, longtime, retired dairy farmer Gene Martin and his wife Anita of Washington, Kansas, spent time crouching down to see how the cows’ udders lined-up with the robotic milkers.
“It’s amazing. I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime,” Gene Martin said while watching the milk flowing into a long tube, then into a milk bucket inside a chamber. “I grew up milking 27 head by hand with my dad, brother and sister before I went to school every morning.”
The robotic system takes 6 ½ minutes to milk each cow. The 10 robotic milkers at Stateline are able to milk 90 cows every hour.
The driving force for robots is reducing labor, said Ross Whorton, manager of Whorton’s Inc., who sells the Lely milking systems.
“It’s hard to have people milk many cows. But for smaller farms, the reasons for robotics are usually to spend more time with family,” he said.
Source: agupdate.com
Photo Credit: GettyImages-DimaSobko
Categories: Kansas, Livestock, Dairy Cattle