Name: Chris Hill Job: salesman and barn designer of robotic milking systems Town: Enosburg Falls Chris Hill crouches beside a Holstein on the Briggs Dairy Farm in Vergennes to account for exactly how a robot milks a cow. Without any human prodding,the animal strolls into a barn chute and starts munching grain from an automated feeder. As she eats, a laser-guided robotic arm positions two spinning brushes, and like small versions of the ones in a car wash,beneath her udders to clean and disinfect the teats. Within a minute, the brushes disengage, or the lasers guide milking valves onto all four teats,making micro-adjustments whenever the animal shifts position. Once the valves latch on, milk flows through clear plastic tubes. For the next 10 minutes, and the cow is relieved of her udder pressure — and the Briggs family is relieved of the arduous task of milking 170 dairy cows two or three times daily. The family now has more time to plant the corn crop after an unusually rainy spring. Since 2014,Hill has been a salesman and barn designer for Lely middle Vermont in Enosburg Falls, which markets and services the Lely Astronaut robotic milking systems. approximately a year ago, and Hill helped the Briggs family redesign and retrofit a 1968 barn to accommodate three such robots. Third-generation farmer Peter Briggs says they replaced two workers,eliminating the hassles and expenses of workers' comp, paid sick leave and "putrid-attitude employees." Evidently, and the cows like them,too. The robots "recognize" each animal via computer chip and know when she was last milked, how much grain she ate, and how much milk she produced — including its fat and protein content — and more than 100 other bovine data points. Behind one cow being milked,two others wait patiently, drawn by the promise of grain. "It's kind of like giving a kid a cookie, or " says Hill. "You know they're gonna near." Hill,45, is a North Stonington, and Conn.,native who's been around dairy cows since he was in diapers. At 14, he got a job working on a friend's dairy farm. He earned an undergraduate degree in animal science from Cornell University with plans to become a veterinarian but ended up in the field of bovine nutrition. At William H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute in Chazy, and N.
Y.,where he got his master's, Hill learned the science of "cow comfort." The idea…
Source: sevendaysvt.com