Skilled labor is becoming harder to find in agriculture. As a result, more and more farmers are turning to robots to care for their livestock. Automation is easing the workload in barns, from milking to feeding.
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00:01No humans work in this barn.
00:03170 cattle are looked after around the clock by robots.
00:08The animals are fed four times a day.
00:10AI calculates exactly how much they need.
00:13Feeding systems like these cost 100,000 euros, but they pay off quickly.
00:18Farmhands are hard to find, and in the long run, robots are cheaper.
00:22The barn is bedded with straw so the cows can lie down in comfort.
00:26Outside, feed is processed and delivered to the animals fully automatically.
00:34Meanwhile, the farmer is off duty, controlling and monitoring everything via an app on his smartphone.
00:43I've got different rations for different animals.
00:46Cows, heifers, dry cows, bulls, young stock, transition feed, seven feeding plants.
00:53And the system handles all of it.
00:56If you did that with a manual mixer, you'd need someone working three hours a day.
01:01Thanks to full automation, he's been able to expand his herd by 30 animals.
01:07Each cow wears a collar with a sensor connected to the app.
01:11It constantly provides data on each individual cow.
01:14The collar tells you how much the cow is eating, how long it's been lying down, feeding times, resting times, rumination activity, which is a great indicator of health.
01:27If there's a deviation, you get an alert.
01:29And then you can check.
01:31Is it eating less?
01:32Is something wrong?
01:34The milking robot also makes life easier.
01:38No extra staff needed.
01:40The cows quickly learn to line up on their own, heading to the station at least four times a day.
01:45Sensors guide the milking unit into place.
01:48It's just the kind of repetitive work younger farmers want to avoid.
01:52Many of his robotic systems come from this Austrian company.
01:55Worldwide, demand for automation and agriculture is growing fast.
02:00These machines are shipped to Brazil, the Middle East and Australia.
02:04Their office is the global operations hub.
02:08We can access any device anywhere in the world, if the internet connection is stable.
02:14We can see exactly what each circuit board is doing, or not doing.
02:19More and more farms are handing over routine tasks to robots.
02:23The goal is to keep farming sustainable and appealing for the next generation.
02:29And the animals, they don't seem to mind.