Proving that, eventually, every task will be roboticized, there is this video. It shows a robot that automatically milks cows:

But if you really want your mind blown, there is this – 80 cows at once:

I am not a dairy farmer, but I have spent a fair amount of time on dairy farms. If you have never been to a dairy farm, you might wonder why the cows are so agreeable to all this. It’s because a dairy cow wants to be milked at a certain time of day. Not being a dairy cow, I cannot know exactly what it feels like, but I imagine it is something like needing to go to the restroom, but you need someone else (in nature it would be the calf, but in modern dairy farms it is a milking machine) to do it for you.

However, having spent a fair amount of time on dairy farms, these videos seem to leave out three things. First, there are times when cows are having “a bad day”, one or more of them, and the “flow” breaks down. This can also happen if one or more of the cows get spooked by something.

The second thing is the fact that dairy farms, especially in winter, can be very, very messy places. Perhaps there are management practices that can completely eliminate the mess, but I have never been to one of those farms. The surgically clean cows and utters seen in these videos strike me as “optimal conditions.” Maybe there is a station that pressure washes the cows before they make it into the milking parlor.

The third thing is the “something goes wrong” category. Even human beings have problems when “something goes wrong”. Just look at traffic in any major city when there is a fender bender (never mind a full accident). Look at how hard it is for people to make it through self-check-out at the grocery store without some kind of assistance. So in a dairy parlor: A cow gets sick; An udder gets clogged; One of the cows falls; the milk is infected… Anything. The fact that there are no humans shown to fix problems seems like a radical idealization.

But it is a start, and when it works, it works well, especially as shown in the second video.

This is not the only robot working around dairy cows. Here is an automatic feeding system:

Automatic cow brushes:

RFID tags for cows:

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