A few days ago it was published that 4 more U.S. dairy farms would add fully automated robotic rotary parlor by the end of 2018.
Robotic milking, or automatic milking systems (AMS), have been around for 25 years and are now a mainstream technology in Europe (these systems account for more than half of the new installations in the UK). There are about 50,000 milking robots operating worldwide.
Rotary parlors are also helping humans to exploit cows for a while now. The combination of the two is quite new, and is said to “give dairy farmers the efficiency of rotary parlors with the consistency of robotic milking”.

The mechanization of the dairy industry is extremely worrying. Continue reading →