Dairy Farmer's Robotic Milker Creates Free Time

It's fun sometimes to be nostalgic about the good old days. And there is much to recommend them.

But for the small dairyfarmer, modern innovation can be liberating. Just ask Vernon Horst.

Horst is a third-generation dairy farmer and a second generation at his present location in the Greenvillage area.

"When I was a little boy," Horst said, "my dad milked cows by hand. We've come a long way since then. "

This year marks the third anniversary of Horst having a Lely Robotic Milking Machine distributed by the local division of Fisher and Thompson.

"The machine I have is designed for the small farmer," Horst said. "It can only milk 65 cows a day, so that's all you need to justify it. It allows us to have a lifestyle and still milk cows. We're not tied down to the twice-a-day milking.

"We can do things that we couldn't do before and still know that the work is being done properly. This machine does the work without complaint and never calls in sick."

Horst and his wife, Luanne, handle the farm alone. They milk about 60 cows and production has gone up since the cows are milked more than twice a day. The average is around 2.6 times.

Another advantage is that the higher-producing cows can get milked more often and the lower-producing cows less often. The cow decides when it wants to be milked.

Each cow has an identification tag that is read by the machine, and if the machine agrees that it is time for another milking, it takes over and does everything. Horst has some cows that are milked four times a day.

The machine has several devices to control the quality of the milk. Each quarter has a separate line and the machines can tell what each quarter is doing. It not only measures the production of each quarter, it looks at the color of each quarter. If any problem is detected, the milk is routed away from the main tank.

Horst makes good use of the free time made possible by the machine. He is on the board of directors of two dairy promotion boards: the Mid-Atlantic Dairy Association and the Pennsylvania Dairy Promotion Program. The Mid-Atlantic group promotes dairies in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware.

Horst also represents the mid-Atlantic region on a national board that meets four or five times a year.

They asked Horst to go to China to promote the U.S. Dairy Export Council.

"We weren't there to help China develop a dairy industry," he said, "but rather to get China to use more of our dairy products."

As if that isn't enough, Horst is also on the Cumberland Valley Co-Op board of directors. And they hosted around 4,000 people for the Franklin County Farm Fest.

So the robotic machine frees Horst from the twice-a-day, seven-days-a-week milking routine. And Horst makes the best of this freedom.

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East-ender is published every other Monday. Tom Gilbert can be reached at gilberts@innernet.net and 377-7939.