The world of dairy farming has come a long way since Anna Baldwen from New Jersey patented her “Hygienic Glove Milker” in 1879.
The cows hated it and would often kick over the milk bucket.
But her rudimentary handheld mechanized pump heralded a new era in technology.
Farmers today are braced for another revolution. Large herds of cows are, for the first time, being milked by robots, thanks to Afimilk, based at Kibbutz Afikim, northern Israel.
In 1979, Afimilk launched the world’s first “milk meter” – which measures the yield of each individual cow, senses when the milking is over, checks for health issues and collects a mass of data that has transformed the way dairy farms operate.
It is now disrupting the dairy industry again, with the first robotic milking solution suitable for medium-sized farms — those with 500 to 5,000 cows.

Big farms (the world’s biggest has 160,000 cows) use industrial rotary milking parlors, in which the cows are rotated around a central platform, allowing each one to be milked in sequence.
Small farms, which are common in Europe, are dispensing with the routine of milking cows three times a day. Since as far back as the late 1990s many of them have been using milking robots.
The cows decide for themselves when they need milking, and the robot obliges. It frees the owners of small herds from having to be there three times a day for milking.
But neither of these solutions is practical or workable for a medium-sized farm.

The robots that small farms use aren’t scalable. “For 120 cows it’s a very good solution,” says Oren Drori, Afimilk’s VP Product. “For 600 dairy cows it’s pretty difficult. For 2,000 cows it’s impossible.”
On the other hand, the rotary milking parlors used by the mega-farms could do the job, but they’d be a multimillion-dollar sledgehammer to crack a nut. Too big, too costly, too dependent on human milking staff.
So Afimilk is filling a gap in the market, meeting the needs of a herd that’s neither too big nor too small for existing solutions.

A milking fleet
The Afimilk Synergy system took five years and $30 million to develop. It was launched earlier this year after trials in Israel.
A small fleet of robots lines up on a track at ground level, waiting for the cows to be herded in at milking time. The robots depart, identify which cow they’re milking and prepare and sanitize its udders.
They attach the milking cups that suck out the milk, then automatically remove them (about eight minutes later) when milking is over.
Finally, they apply iodine to the cows’ teats to disinfect them. The robots also take 3D images and collect data on each cow’s wellbeing.

“We are now replacing almost all the people with milking robots and we only need one supervisor to look after the entire system,” says Drori.
There’s a human milker there to check everything’s okay, but the robots perform the entire milking task independently.
And that addresses one of the biggest problems in dairy farming.
“People don’t want to milk cows,” says Drori. “Just like people don’t want to pick cotton or harvest wheat. The cost of labor is secondary. The main problem is that people just don’t want to it.”
What dairy farmers need
Afimilk is an established company, with 250 employees, decades of experience and a worldwide reputation. All of that allowed it to create a novel product that may have been difficult for a less established company to commercialize, market and distribute, Drori points out.
Afimilk has built its robotic milking solution of the back of 3D vision, micro-optics, micro-electronics, algorithms for spatial identification, machine learning, and evolving mechanical concepts that simply weren’t available a decade ago.
It also benefits from a profound understanding of what dairy farmers need.
“We already have a very impressive lineup of farms that are ordering this solution,” Drori says. “Not just interested in it — already placing orders. We are right now completing installation at a farm in the Czech Republic, and at another in Italy.”
In addition, Afimilk has installed two of the systems in Israel and will install a third soon.
“Next year, we will probably install anything between 10 and 20 systems in Israel and in Europe,” Drori tells ISRAEL21c.
Most farmers are conservative about adopting new technology, he adds.
“It’s a big revolution in the farm and it’s in the mission-critical spot of the farmer,” says Drori. “So the farmer has to have a very high level of trust in the technology in order to commit to it.”
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