Peter and Madonne Rainville in front of their new barn at Four Girls Dairy, with their four girls
It Takes A RobotFairfax farmers start over with latest in technology
By LISA M. BOUCHER - St. Albans Messenger Correspondent
Published in The Monday, July 27, 2009 Edition Of The St. Albans MessengerFAIRFAX—Madonne Rainville proudly shows off the state-of-the-art barn that is being built in the aftermath of a devastating fire that destroyed her family’s livelihood in April 08. She admits that discussion or video of the fire that leveled the 100 year-old barn and killed half their herd, still stirs raw emotion.
The mother of four recalls the hardest part of that fateful morning as being the animals that were trapped in the barn and not wanting her children to be present when they were disposed of.
“You could tell the cows had struggled to try to get out,” Rainville said ruefully,
She doesn’t think about that and instead is looking ahead to the day in the near future that their farm will be operational again and they can get back to the business of running it. They’re scheduled to be up and running again by August 1.
Rainville and her husband Peter spent time traveling this past year to determine what they wanted to do and get some ‘best practice’ ideas.
A Lely Robotic Milking System has been installed in the new barn, the first one in Franklin County and only the second in Vermont.
“The cow comes in under her own free will, she gets milked, and she gets grain in there,” said Paul Godin, a Lely representative. “Some of them get milked four or five times a day, which is better for the animal’s health.”
Godin explained the system takes up less space and building material compared to a conventional ‘milking parlor’ thus making it more cost effective and eliminates the centuries-old twice-a-day-milking we’ve all come to associate with the life of farming and cows.
“It’s like nature,” said Godin. “When a cow has a calf out in the wild it nurses on the mother several times a day, so she doesn’t build up a big utter. It just frees up the farmer from the physical act of doing [those] chores.”
The robotic milker would be more aptly named the “farmer’s little helper,” it has revolutionized the milking process like no other device before it. It milks the cow several times a day, cleans automatically three times a day, monitors the quality and quantity of milk produced by individual cows in each quarter of their utter, will detect a problem and automatically dump bad milk before it is mixed with the other, preventing an entire load from being bad and lets the farmer know.
“If there is a problem we’re going to know about it and be able to treat it sooner,” said Godin
The robotic milker also stores information on each cow, produces reports, and makes it easier for the milk to be picked up by the hauler (in this case, the St. Albans Coop), thereby eliminating the need for a schedule, as the milk can be picked up any time.
“We have a computer in the office in here and one in the house,” said Rainville. Pointing out that while the couple will be able to monitor the herd reports from wherever they are, it doesn’t eliminate the need for a physical presence in the barn, at least a couple of times a day.
“When they come to the barn to do chores, the computer will produce a list of cows that haven’t been to the milker,” said Godin. “Then they can check on them and see what’s going on, because the cows will establish their own routines for going.”
The cows will have a collar with a transponder that will be recognized by a censor on the gate. The information is read and the machine knows which cow is being milked. It cleans the utter with a brush, there are lasers within the arm of the milker that maps the coordinates of each cow’s utter when it’s automatically attaching, and then the information is stored in the system for each cow.
The milker automatically adjusts the stored teat coordinates as they change through a cow’s lactation and will page the farmer if there is a problem with the robot.
Even though the robot can detect where a cow is having a problem, it cannot [yet] isolate the milk from that quarter, so for the duration of her illness all of that cow’s milk will have to be dumped, however it will be detected immediately before any cross contamination occurs of the rest of the herd’s milk.
The robot is then programmed with the information that the cow is being treated and it automatically discards her milk for the preset number of days.
“Basically we did this for labor efficiency, whether our own or displacing an employee,” said Rainville of the couple’s decision to forego a traditional milking parlor. “This will give us the time to manage the herd the way it should be managed, instead of spending all our time milking, it will give us time to do that.”
Rainville explained how much better it will be not to have to stop in the middle of other chores, such as haying, to milk the cows. She remarked on having the flexibility of not being tied to a milking schedule and the ease in which they could increase their herd if they wanted by adding another milker, as it doesn’t require a lot of space or a barn necessarily. Cows can be trained to go to any building it is housed in.
That flexibility is especially important with four active and busy young girls in the house. They range in age from 12 to five and are the inspiration behind the new farm’s name, “Four Girls Dairy.”
One robotic milker services about 65 cows and the cost to install the first one is approximately $200,000 on par with building a conventional milking parlor with labor and building materials, etc. To install subsequent milkers, the cost goes down.
“We visited a farm in new York that had four Mexican laborers milking 300 cows,” said Rainville. “They decided to put in five robots and eliminated the laborers. A larger farm has an easier time justifying the cost of a robot, because they can go to the bank and say ‘This is how much I pay in labor and this is how much my robot payment would be.’ The robot pretty much pays for itself with the labor cost savings.”
Rainville pointed out that it’s harder for a smaller farm to justify the need for one especially in their case when it wasn’t for labor costs savings, but a means to make their life easier.
“If you’re going to start over, why not start over with the latest technology you can get?” Rainville said. “Why wouldn’t you want the latest technology? One of my biggest reasons was the four girls, if someday they want to be involved in this, it isn’t backbreaking work.”
With the innovative machinery being installed on the family farm, she pointed out that her daughters could be farmers if they wanted to and would not have to suffer the damage to their bodies that the repetitive action of milking could cause.
“I’m sure they’re going to know this robot better than my husband and I,” Rainville laughed. “Over the next few years, I’m sure they will understand the software better than we will, I don’t have any doubt. It opens the door for them in the future—we don’t have any sons, all girls.”
She explained how their journey visiting farms across the country gradually led them to the robot decision.
“We visited the first farmer to ever get one, out in Wisconsin,” she said. “He still had the first robots he purchased and they were still running fine. We figured, of anybody, he was the person to talk to. The person that’s had them the longest here in the U.S., to talk about any issues he may have had. He was still happy with them.”
She also said the couple visited a bunch of other farms that were just putting them in, looked at barn design and how to design the barn around the robot. By the time they came back home last September their minds were made up.
Rainville said they knew they would rebuild right away, but they had thought about other things, saying that she has done the “nine to five thing before,” and wasn’t interested in going back to that lifestyle. She and her husband enjoy working and having their kids at home, they have been farming for 10 years. Their oldest child was only two when they bought the farm.
She said they picked up some ideas on barn design that they haven’t seen in Vermont and are happy that they took the time to travel and see what they did. Rainville, who has a background in engineering, also spent a week on a farm in western New York, training on a robot.
In light of the experience of the fire, she explains that the comfort of her cows is especially important to her. There are certain amenities that have been installed in the barn for their comfort, aside from the new milker.
“We call this barn a cow spa, because we’ve made it as comfortable as a cow could be, I guess,” she said, with a laugh.
These include, rubber flooring for foot health, thick pasture mats, foot bath, cow brush—a motorized brush installed on a post that will spin when a cow touches it, to scratch her back, a clear span truss (70’ wide), extra head room in the stall to lunge forward when getting up, and a maternity pen bedded with sand to calf in.
Rainville’s love what they do and couldn’t think of doing anything else even as the family farm becomes an endangered species in Vermont. They seriously considered and thoroughly researched their options and made decisions based on what was best for their family and their animals.
“In that commercial they say ‘Happy cows come from California,’ but that’s not true, they come from right here,” said Rainville pointing at her barn floor.
***There will be an open house Saturday, August 8 from 10 a.m.to 5 p.m. at the Rainville Farm on Swamp Road in Fairfax, showcasing the new robotic milker.
