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| A few hours away from me in Massey, Ontario, is John Mooney's farm. He was the first dairy farmer in Northern Ontario brave enough to have robots installed several years ago, despite being at least 6 hours away from the Lely dealer (and that's with good weather conditions for driving --- lots of times it's not so good.) He has set up webcams and broadband connections to his barn so that he or the dealer can monitor his machines at anytime, anywhere an internet connection exists.
He has two robots, but only enough cows (at least at the time of install) that he really only needs one. So he has a builtin backup redundancy in case of failure of one unit. This would never fly economically in normal areas but he has received government "R&D" funding from either "Ontario Heritage" or FedNor. (Farmers in northern ontario will know what we're talking about).
Our family quit milking commercially (at least a dozen cows) in the late 70's when the local creamery closed, but kept a cow or two for family and under the table sales for years afterwards. I always said, after seeing promotional videos of the Delaval system on the net, that if I milked cows now that I would keep playing the video over and over until I was brave enough to pick up the phone to the dealer. | |
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someone talk me out of buying robot milkers
