Two things ... When I was in a conversational Spanish class, most of my classmates were farm family members who needed to commuicate with the help.
Also, DeLaval has a robotic milker on display at our county fair every year. A couple of local farms are using them and they are working out well.
Once the farm is too big for the family to take care of, you either have to hire people or mechanize/automate.
The robotic milker won’t be no-call, no-show; won’t show up drunk or high or hung-over; won’t have paperwork and immigration problems; neither you nor the robot have to speak Spanglish; and the heavier producing cows are able to get milked more often and be more comfortable.
The American way is to throw technology at it, which is why US agriculture is so productive.
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. …It is not typically the American way at its core.
My question is what do they do if the robot goes down? You could easily end up with more cows than you could handle by hand when you hit the blue screen of death.
This seems like a good idea. And if I recall correctly, Japan’s interest in robotics and automation after World War II was precisely to avoid having to import foreign labor.