When designing a new or retrofit barn for automation, it is essential to give much thought to cow comfort, as well as the flow of cows and people in the barn. To ensure your barn layout is optimized for cow traffic and efficient labor workflow, here are some fundamental considerations to help evaluate robot barn design.

This year marks eight years of progress in pest bird management research in my laboratory. Eight years ago, I asked a group of dairy farmers my typical question, “What keeps you up at night?”

The six freedoms of a cow outlined by a dairy farming training organization are space, rest, water, air, light and feed. These freedoms have aligned benchmarking goals to help producers realize higher returns on current and future farm investments.

In this episode, host Kimmi Devaney talks with Derrick Josi, who is an Oregon dairy farmer and author that has built an online presence of 800,000 followers on Facebook. He recently moved cows into new facilities on the farm.

After a few months of curtain and panel systems sitting fully open and not moving during hot weather, there comes a time every year when we must all face the fact that colder weather is coming.