An Israeli startup has launched the world’s first robotic milking parlour.
It milks a herd of 5,000 cows two or three times a day – the entire job, with no human intervention.
Afimilk, long established as a global leader in computerised dairy‑farm systems, began operating the pioneering parlour last year. It now operates at four farms in Israel, two in the Czech Republic and one in Italy, and the company expects to install as many as 20 more systems next year.
A small fleet of robots are lined up on a track at ground level, waiting for the cows to be herded in at milking time. Each robot identifies which cow it will milk using a smart ear tag.
They then prepare and sanitise the cows’ udders, attach the milking cups that suck out the milk, remove them (about eight minutes later) when milking is over and disinfect the teats.
It’s a far cry from the “Hygienic Glove Milker”, patented in the US in 1879 as the first mechanical milking device, which cows hated so much they’d often kick over the milk buckets.
Afimilk’s robots are so advanced they don’t just do the milking. They take 3D images of the cows’ teats, collect data on each animal’s well-being and flag potential problems. The only human required simply checks everything’s working OK.
The Afimilk robots are filling a critical gap in the milking market. Larger farms use industrial rotary milking parlours, in which the cows rotate around a central platform, allowing each one to be milked in sequence. That’s fine for a mega-herd of 100,000 cows, but for a medium-sized dairy farm, with 500 to 5,000 animals, it’s a multi-million pound sledgehammer to crack a modest nut.
At the other end of the scale are the small-time farmers with perhaps 100 cows. They endured the “near-slavery” of needing to be present for every milking, until they were liberated by robots that milk on-demand. But the tech that powers on-demand robots would prove chaotic and impossibly expensive for a medium-sized herd.
That’s what prompted Afimilk to spend five years and in excess of £20 million developing Synergy, the world’s first robotic milking parlour. It plugs the gap, providing a robotic solution for farmers with medium-sized herds, addressing one of the biggest problems in dairy farming.
“People don’t want to milk cows,” says Oren Drori, Afimilk’s vice president of product, “just like people don’t want to pick cotton or harvest wheat. The cost of labour is secondary, the main problem is that people just don’t want to do it.”
The company, based at Kibbutz Afikim, in the Jordan Valley, benefits from a profound understanding of what dairy farmers need. It has been innovating since 1977, when it launched the world’s first electronic milk meter – a device that transformed the way dairy farms operate. It measures the yield of each individual cow, sensing when the milking is over, checking for health issues, and collecting a mass of data.
Afimilk has now gone further, building its robotic milking solution on the back of research into the use of 3D vision, micro-optics, micro-electronics, algorithms for spatially identifying objects, machine learning, and by evolving mechanical concepts that simply weren’t available a decade ago.
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