How Milking Robots Are Helping One Family's 70-Year-Old Dairy Farm Thrive In 2017 | collaboration | Scoop.it

At the time, they were spending twelve hours a day on milking alone (six hours at noon and six hours at midnight), but with Amanda and her siblings coming into the age at which they could start thinking about taking over the farm’s ownership and management, they needed a way to free up their time so they could focus on the aspects of the business that best fit their skills and personalities.

“The system is very expensive, but the reason that we did it was looking ahead, and looking at the fact that my generation, we don't want to spend 12 hours a day stuck in a milking parlor. We want to be a lot more involved in the individualized cow care, and my brother would much rather be out in the fields doing cropping,” Amanda says. “And so, we decided that this is a really important aspect to our succession plan.”