GEA Farm Technologies and Bayland Buildings, Inc. has broken ground on a 72-stall all-robotic rotary parlor on a Wisconsin farm.
The robotic rotary parlor will be the first of its kind in North America and also the largest rotary robotic milking system in the world.
Matt Daley, GEA CEO, says, “The application of this technology on such a large operation has not been done anywhere else in the world and for most every dairy farmer in America, this is quite significant.”
Nick Mlsna, the owner of the farm near Cashton, Wisconsin, where the robotic system is going in, expects to milk twice as many cows once installation is complete.
“The current parlor (built in the 1990s), is pressured with cow flow and we struggle to stay on schedule milking 900 cows three times a day,” says Mlsna.
The rotary robotic system will not only lower labor costs and be more efficient, Daley says the robots will do a much more consistent job of teat disinfection and udder prep than human milkers working eight hour shifts.
If everything goes according to plan, the first cows should be milked in the facility in March 2015.
