SPRINGVILLE - More than 19,000 pounds of milk is produced each day at the Blesy Farm south of Springville.
What's amazing is that the farmers who work there can do it without laying their hands upon a single cow.
Thanks to four Lely Astronaut robotic milking systems installed on the farm in September, the cows practically milk themselves - some as many as four times a day.
The 1,200-acre farm is co-owned and -operated by Harold Blesy and his son, Nathan. While the process of getting the cows acclimated to getting up and walking into an automatic milker was trying at first, cows now line up for their turn in one of the farm's milking devices - which more resemble a contraption out of a science-fiction movie than anything one would envision would be inside the normal-looking red barn at the end of Henrietta Road.
''Cows might act stupid, but they are creatures of habit,'' Harold Blesy said. ''You put them out in this environment, and they go in, they get milked, and they are happy.''
STATE-OF-THE-ART INVESTMENT
When Harold Blesy bought the farm on Henrietta Road in April 1966, he started milking 30 cows.
''Kids these days don't know how cows were milked in the old days,'' Harold said. ''So this is something your father or grandfather would appreciate.''
The Blesy Farm now milks 250 cows, with another 250 young stock. The farm had been operating with a milking parlor - rustling cows 16 at a time into a room - for decades, Blesy said. Milking twice a day with that method was one thing, but when the farmers wanted to increase to three-times-a-day milking, a change was definitely needed.
''We'd been looking at robots off and on for the past five, six, seven years,'' Harold said. ''They've had them out, but we just didn't think they were working quite right.''
After a visit to the annual Farm Show in Syracuse in February 2009, the Blesys stopped at a farm near Rochester that is operated by a friend of Nathan. That farm had installed seven robotic milking machines in August of the previous year - and seeing them in action was all the convincing the Blesys needed to take the plunge themselves.
While the investment for four robotic milking machines was not a light one - about $800,000 - the Blesys said that when one considers the amount of money farmers spend on other parts of their operations, putting that kind of money into a state-of-the-art milking system isn't something that should be out of the question.
''A lot of dairy farms will have brand-new tractors, brand-new cornplanters - a cornplanter you'll use two days out of the year,'' Harold said. ''This thing you use all the time. Our job is to make money from milking cows, so that's why we bought the automatic takeoff - to milk more cows with less help.''
That's not to say the Blesys have eliminated their human staff completely and replaced it with artificial intelligence. Staffers are still kept on-hand to monitor the milking process, feed livestock and calves, and clean the robot systems.
However, Blesy said, if the robots had been installed after the farm had already begun milking three times a day, the milker from the third shift would have been let go.
''There's other stuff to do other than milking,'' Harold said, adding that he and his son have been able to tend to more of the administrative tasks of the farm - in addition to enjoying a bit more free time.
FUTURISTIC PROCESS
When one of the Blesys' 250 cows - which are cordoned off into pens of about 60 cows each - steps into one of the farm's milkers, the process immediately begins.
A transponder fastened around the cow's neck is read by the robot, letting it know which cow has entered the machine. Cows can only be milked once every five hours - if the cow has been inside the machine more recently than that, the door is re-opened and the cow is released.
Cows enjoy being milked, Harold said. In one case, he said, he watched a cow that knew her five-hour waiting period had nearly expired.
''One day, I watched a cow walk in and get refused - then she came back in again and got refused again,'' he said. ''She came back a third time and that time it accepted her. She was only 10 minutes early. She knew it was close.''
Standing in the free-stall area of the barn, it is not uncommon to see a cow from the other side of a pen leisurely climb to its feet and wander over to a milking station to wait in line for its turn to be milked. The Blesys say it is a stark contrast to the sometimes hectic days of trying to wrangle cows into the milking parlor.
''It's not something to be afraid of, like going into the milking parlor where it's crowded and they're tense and uneasy,'' Harold said. ''Here, they're relaxed.''
Once a cow is ready to be milked inside the system - and a helping of grain, comparable to the average amount of milk the cow gives, is given to the cow by the machine - the robot arm extends into place. A spinning brush comes out first to wash each teat with a peroxide solution. The brushes are then rinsed and used to wash the peroxide off.
A laser beam precisely locates each teat on the udder, allowing the milking device to be accurately affixed. A computer screen gives a second-by-second readout of how much milk has come off each quarter of the udder.
Milk is analyzed as it comes out of the system, Nathan said, allowing for problems to be spotted right away.
''There are sensors in there that detect the color and conductivity - if there is any mastitis, it will put her on a list in the PC,'' he said. ''It will also give you attention if the milk production is down a certain amount, or if her weight is down a certain amount.''
The main computer keeps track of the progress of all 250 cows, and Nathan said one of his important jobs on the farm has become monitoring the readouts and programming the computer to keep track of cows that are being treated - automatically dumping tainted milk and keeping it out of the supply.
The nice thing about that, however, is that he can do it from afar.
''(Nathan) was gone for a week in Florida,'' his father said. ''I had a problem with a cow that I had to treat, and I didn't know how to punch it into the computer - so he did it from his laptop in Florida.''
HIGH-TECH MEETS COUNTRY
While Nathan said the robots have been quite reliable in the nine months since they have been installed, there have of course been minor issues that have needed to be remedied.
It's no surprise that those are also handled in a somewhat high-tech fashion.
''It calls my cell phone (if there is a problem),'' Nathan said. ''You can program eight numbers into it - it calls me first, and if I don't answer it, it calls the next number until someone answers.''
The machine transmits an error message through the phone to the farmer to alert him that something has gone awry, Nathan said. More often than not, he said, the fix is routine.
''They kick the hoses off - if that cup pulls down and the hoses are twisted around backward, the cup will fall over when it goes to attach,'' Nathan said. ''You just turn the hose back around. It's usually no big deal.''
There are currently fewer than 40 robotic milking machines in New York state, the Blesys said, and all of them have been installed within the past two years.
While Lely does schedule routine maintenance and upgrade visits to the few farms in the state which use the systems, the Blesys said much of the repair work that needs to be done on the robots can be done over the phone or the Internet.
''The maintenance guy was in Iowa two weeks ago, and we were telling him the acid rinse wasn't working on one robot,'' Harold said. ''In Iowa, he punched the four machines up on the computer and found out the sensor was bad. They can troubleshoot a lot over the Internet.''
''Internet'' and ''robots'' are words that don't seem to blend with a life of cows and corn. But at the Blesy Farm in Springville, as well as at several others across New York state, they are working hand-in-hand with great success.
In fact, the Blesys are enjoying their robot experience so much that they are looking into the possibility of adding a robot feeding system to their farm as well.
''We've just been so impressed,'' Harold said of the robots.
The Blesy Farm offers free tours of its operation to anyone who is interested in learning more about robotic milking. For more information, look it up on Facebook by searching for ''Blesy Farms LLC.''
