At Larson Farms Inc., about 240 cows eat, rest and stand in line to be milked in a barn that is ran almost entirely by robots. The dairy operation is the fourth farm in Nebraska to implement the technology.
“When we built the barn in 2018, we really were looking to set up what is going to be best for the cow,” said Bob Larson, owner. “Probably about 16 hours a day, nobody is in the barn.”
Bob said it took about a week to acclimate the cows to the technology. Because the cows naturally want to be milked, they walk into the milking station on their own and are awarded with treat pellets that energize them. Each cow has a collar that tracks their number of steps, how often they’ve been milked, how much milk they are producing.
Bob compares the collars to “Fitbits.”
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