- Author: Michael Hsu
Automatic milking systems increasingly used in California amid labor challenges
When third-generation dairy farmer Shonda Reid first saw a milking robot at a farm show 13 years ago, she immediately recognized that the technology represented the future. Her father, however, took a bit more convincing.
“I came home and showed him and said, ‘This is what we need to do.' And he thought I was kidding!” said Reid, dairy and farm manager for Fred Rau Dairy, which has a herd of 1,400 milk cows in Fresno County.
Years later, after the family had visited several dairies using automatic milking systems (AMS) across the U.S., they installed their first six robots in November 2021. By fall 2022, they had 24 robots, evenly split between two newly built “free stall” barns where the cows can freely go to the milking machines.
As Fred Rau Dairy was one of the first in California to implement AMS at such a scale, Reid and her team have been instrumental in growing practical knowledge on these systems. She also has been a valued partner to Daniela Bruno, University of California Cooperative Extension dairy advisor for Fresno, Madera and Kings counties.
“Automatic milking robots are not a new technology, but it's new to California,” said Bruno, noting that the milking robots were first used on small, family-run farms in Europe, where the technology granted family members more time for rest and other pursuits.
To better understand the feasibility of milking robots for large dairies in California, Bruno – alongside former UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine professor Fernanda Ferreira, University of Minnesota researcher Marcia Endres and other collaborators – began a project in 2020 to study the risks and opportunities of automated systems.
“The information is extremely useful for California producers to make informed decisions about implementing AMS on their facilities,” said Denise Mullinax, executive director of the California Dairy Research Foundation, which supported the effort through a competitive grant. “Cow care, labor requirements and profitability are key issues for producers, and CDRF was pleased to support this project which assists producers in understanding how AMS may impact those areas on their facility.”
Dairy farmer: ‘We needed to make some changes'
The project produced a paper analyzing existing research on automatic systems, which have been more widely used in the Midwest, where there are more small-scale, family-run dairies. In 2020, there were only 14 “box robots” in California, according to Bruno. Now there are about 200 across California – and both Bruno and Reid cited labor challenges as the primary reason for the increased use of automated systems.
“California suffers from labor quality and quantity issues,” Bruno said. “By bringing robots to California, you can minimize those problems.”
Higher costs of hiring and retaining employees, driven in part by new labor laws, are one factor. And then there's the reliability and availability of labor, as fewer people are willing to do the physically demanding work of conventional milking.
“People just don't want to milk in a flat barn [a conventional setup where the employee works at the same level as the cow] – there's a lot of kneeling, squatting, that type of thing – it's pretty tough on the body,” Reid explained.
Faced with labor shortages and mounting regulatory burdens, Reid said Fred Rau Dairy had to make the leap to automated systems to keep the 80-year-old dairy operation running.
“We needed to make some changes, or we're going out of the dairy business,” she said.
In a survey conducted by Bruno and her colleagues of large dairies using AMS across the U.S., a majority of the 29 respondents reported reductions in labor costs – but survey results did not offer a definitive picture on whether AMS improved bottom-line profitability.
Calmer, healthier cows
Nevertheless, most of the survey respondents said they were generally happy with their transition to automatic systems.
“It's totally met our expectations, and cow health has gotten much better, too,” Reid said.
In a typical conventional system where cows are outside in “open corral” pens, dairy employees must cajole the cows into the milking parlor. But within a “free stall” barn where the cows can voluntarily go to the milking robots when they want, as often as they want, the animals are much less stressed.
“When you think about cow handling, if you have robots, you don't have anybody pushing and screaming at them to walk to the parlor,” Bruno explained. “You have less cow-people interaction so they are more calm; there is less stress.”
In the survey of large dairies using milking robots, more than 90% of the respondents said their cows were calmer. Reid also noted that many people have noticed how calm their cows are in the free stall barns.
“They're not skittish, you can walk in and they don't run,” Reid said. “They'll just watch you or they'll even come up and start licking on your jacket or shirt.”
Bruno also said that many of the large dairies reported fewer cases of mastitis and other diseases, less lameness, and greater milk production. But she added it's hard to know whether the benefits can be attributed to the robots and their real-time monitoring technology – or to changes in the physical environment (cows save energy in the free stall barn setup, versus the open-corral system that requires walking to the milking parlor).
Dairy producers seek counsel on potential transition
Less bovine travel from outside to inside was a boon for Fred Rau Dairy during last year's unusually wet winter.
“Even if it's just a couple of weeks of rain, that mud and manure and everything – you do what you can, but oh my gosh – it's a mess,” said Reid, noting that easier facility maintenance during extreme weather was another benefit of switching to automatic systems within free stall barns.
Reid shared many of her experiences with attendees of an AMS Field Day in October 2022, arranged by Bruno, Ferreira and their collaborators. About 60 farmers, researchers, industry representatives and consultants visited Fred Rau Dairy and Jones Dairy in Merced County.
If a dairy producer is considering implementing automatic systems, Reid recommends that they research all their options, visit dairies that use the systems, and check who in their area would be providing service and technical support.
And there are crucial workforce considerations, as dairy workers must learn an entirely new set of skills and processes. Instead of spending their time fetching the cows, prepping them and milking them in the parlor, workers might need to gather and interpret data from the robots. “Cow people,” as Reid puts it, must become computer people.
“You have a group of people who have been with you for a while, and you hope that they can transition to the new technology of what you're doing,” Reid said.
During this technological transition, and on the myriad other challenges that dairy operators face, Reid said she is grateful for Bruno's expertise and responsiveness.
“If there's something that I need, she's been really good about trying to help – or putting me in contact with the right people,” she explained. “I've enjoyed working with her.”
The AMS project team also includes UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine professor Fabio Lima, postdoctoral researcher Thaisa Marques and former postdoctoral researcher Camila Lage.
/h3>/h3>/h3>/h3>- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine has launched Mondays with Mark, a monthly video series featuring Dean Mark Stetter discussing animal health.
In each episode, viewers get a taste of the incredible scope of what veterinarians do and see how they are incorporating new methods like predictive modeling and social media monitoring to keep domestic and wild creatures and humans safe – all while educating the next generation of veterinarians and scientists.
In the September episode, Stetter talked with Emmanuel Okello, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in dairy health in the Department of Population Health and Reproduction, about alternatives to antimicrobial drugs for cattle at the California Animal Health & Food Safety facility in Tulare.
He also talked with Maurice Pitesky, UC Cooperative Extension poultry specialist, about using modeling to assess risk of avian influenza from waterfowl to commercial and domestic poultry.
New videos come out on the second Monday of every month.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Honey bee experts at UC Davis and Oregon State University (OSU) will teach the comprehensive, asynchronous course, "Honey Bees and Beekeeping for Veterinarians." Registration is now underway at http://www.wifss.ucdavis.edu/beevets/. The course is intended for veterinarians, veterinary technicians, apiculture educators, apiary inspectors and beekeepers in California and Oregon. Participants are encouraged to register today; the course will be available only until June 30, 2020.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD) addresses antibiotic resistance and antimicrobial use in the feed or water of food-producing animals. The VFD implementation aims to ensure the judicious use of antimicrobials, and to minimize the impact of their use in colonies.
This means that beekeepers now need to establish a veterinarian-client-patient relationship to obtain the antibiotics they need to manage foulbrood and other microbial diseases, according to the course instructors.
The training is being offered by the laboratory of Extension apiculturist Elina Lastro Niño, affiliated with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources; the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine; and OSU.
Course authors and developers are the Western Institute for Food and Security (WIFSS), UC Davis; Elina Niño and Bernardo Niño; Jonathan Dear, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, and Ramesh Saglii, OSU's Honey Bee Laboratory.
Instructors said that participants, upon completion of the course, will be able to:
- Describe the importance of honey bees
- Explain the veterinarian's role in commercial beekeeping
- Recognize distinguished characteristics of honey bees
- Recognize specialized beekeeping equipment, including personal protective equipment (PPE)
- Recognize the components of a hive inspection
- Describe honey bee immunity against pathogens, pests and diseases
- Describe common pests and diseases that may impact honey bees
- Describe how the Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD) governs the use of antimicrobial drugs in apiculture
Honey bees are responsible for pollinating one-third of the American diet. They pollinate such specialty crops as apples, melons, cranberries, pumpkins, squash, broccoli, and almonds. However, annual honey bee colony losses are high due to a variety of environmental and biological causes, including bacterial diseases. Historically, beekeepers have self-prescribed antibiotics to control these diseases.
Funding for the development of the “Honey Bees and Beekeeping for Veterinarians” course was made possible by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Specialty Crop Multi-State Program through an agreement between the California Department of Food and Agriculture and The Regents of the University of California, Davis (agreement number 17-0727-001-SF).
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Mark your calendar!
"Beekeeping and Management" will be part of the two-day UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine's 2019 winter conference presented by its Center for Continuing Education in February 2019.
The conference, covering several vet med topics or tracks, is set for Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 9-10. The beekeeping portion is on Sunday morning, Feb. 10.
California Extension apiculturist Elina Lastro Niño, based in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, will present the three seminars dealing with "Beekeeping and Management" in the Gladys Valley Hall, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
The beekeeping schedule:
- 8:10 to 9 a.m.: "Honey Bee Biology and Apiculture Overview"
- 9:10 to 10 a.m.: "Common Issues in American Apiaries"
- 10:30 to 11:20 a.m.: "Honey Bee Bacterial Diseases and Antiobiotic Use"
Special pricing for those interested in attending only the "beekeeping track" is available, announced Saundra Wais, program manager for the Center for Continuing Professional Education. The onsite fee for this section is $45. A live webinar option is available for $40 for those who cannot be on campus, she said.
Several other tracks are scheduled, including Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM), Veterinary Technician (Vet Tech), Feline Dentistry Lab, and Food Animal Reproduction and Medicine (FARM) Club. Some 20 speakers are planned.
Further information, including pricing and registration fees, is available on the Center for Continuing Education site or by contacting Wais at sjwais@ucdavis.edu or (530) 752-3905.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Lark Coffey, an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and a member of the Center for Vectorborne Diseases, will speak on "Zika Virus in Macaques, Mice and Mosquitoes: Contrasting Virulence and Transmissibility in Disparate Hosts."
And her host is medical entomologist and seminar coordinator Geoffrey Attardo, assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. This is part of the department's series of fall seminars.
Coffey says on her website: "Mosquito-borne viruses like Zika, chikungunya, West Nile, St. Louis encephalitis and dengue virus are expanding to cause more human infections worldwide. Unfortunately, no licensed human vaccines for these viruses are available. Management of disease is therefore restricted to palliative care for infected people and minimizing exposure to mosquitoes. Our research focuses on several central themes with a common goal of reducing the burden of disease caused by arboviruses. These include: understanding viral genetic factors that promote arbovirus outbreaks predicting viral mutations that enhance arbovirus transmissibility by mosquitoes and disease in humans or animals increasing safety of candidate live-attenuated vaccines improving arbovirus surveillance in mosquitoes."
Her abstract of her seminar Nov. 7 is technical. "Fetal microcephaly and death are now recognized as severe forms of congenital Zika syndrome; however, it is still unclear whether recent Zika virus (ZIKV) mutations contribute to this phenotype," Coffey says in her abstract. "We identified a single intrahost variant in the ZIKV NS2B protein (NS2BM1404I) from a rhesus macaque (RM) fetus that died after experimental ZIKV inoculation in the first trimester. Targeted deep sequencing flanking NS2B1404 in subsequent cohorts of RM mothers and their fetuses identified NS2BM1404I at minority frequency and sometimes at consensus levels in 3 additional dead or stillborn RM fetuses and/or the plasma of their mothers and in 2 more RM mother and fetus pairs whose fetuses survived to near term or were born alive. In outbred pregnant mice inoculated subcutaneously, we observed that NS2BI1404 engineered into an infectious clone confers fetal infection while ZIKV-NS2BM1404 does not. By examining sequence data from recent epidemics, we found that NS2BM1404I occurs rarely (5/500, 1%) in consensus human ZIKV genomes.
"We also deep sequenced ZIKV genomes from non-pregnant human adults, infants, and Ae. aegypti from the epidemic and observed that NS2BI1404 was more often present at intra-host levels in humans compared to mosquitoes," she continues in her abstract. "Since the primary ZIKV transmission cycle is human-mosquito-human, viral mutations that arise in one host must be maintained in the alternate host to be perpetuated. We therefore hypothesized that ZIKV NS2BM1404Imay not be efficiently transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, explaining its low frequency in humans during outbreaks. Using infectious clone-derived ZIKV, we examined vector competence in Ae. aegypti from Puerto Rico. Although infection and dissemination rates were not different, we found that Ae. aegypti did not transmit ZIKV-NS2BI1404 as efficiently compared to ZIKV-NS2BM1404 5 [7/20 (35%) versus 10/20 (50%), p>0.05] and 7 [3/20 (15%) versus 13/20 (65%), P<0.001, Chi-squared] days post-feed. The poor transmissibility of this potentially vertebrate adaptive ZIKV mutation may explain its low frequency in febrile humans. This data highlights the evolutionary complexity during arbovirus transmission cycles and suggests that some pathogenic viral mutations are not likely to spread in epidemics."
Coffey received her bachelor of science degree in biology from the University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., in 2000, and her doctorate in experimental pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas in 2005.