ROBOTIC MILKING STARTUP STORIES

General Eisenhower is credited with saying, “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” He was talking about planning battles, including the allied invasion of Normandy in World War 2, but his comment fits robotic milking startups too. Things don’t always go the way we plan, but the planning process helps us improvise when things don’t go according to plan. Here are some stories of startups that did not go according to plan, but they were successful because we had a plan.

I was more of a spectator than a participant at my first startup. I regretted that when I was put in charge of my second. We ended up re-teaching the teat positions for many of the cows during the second and third milkings because we had missed a software setting during the first milking. That put us behind schedule, and I had an airplane to catch whether the cows were ready to come to the robots or not. With some hesitation, we stopped pushing cows and waited for them to come on their own – and waited – and waited. They finally did come, and all the robots were full, and cows were waiting in line, when I did my final walk through before leaving for the airport. Few things are more rewarding than watching cows come to the robots on their own after all the effort of pushing them through the robots. I was hooked.

Which reminds me of a startup when the gates weren’t hooked. I always spent a lot of time coaching about grouping cows with sturdy gates. During the cow-training phase, we wanted a milking group and a resting group, and in the milking group the milked cows were separated from the unmilked cows. I learned that it was very important to make sure everyone understood. The worst misunderstanding resulted in all of the gates being opened before a third of the cows got through the robots on the first milking. All we could do was close the gates and let the robots sort the milked cows from the unmilked cows. It was a temporary setback, but a few years later, that farm is one of the most successful I have worked with.

Trying to do too much at once can be a problem too. Of course, that includes the people who think they can push cow for 72 hours straight without sleep – I never tried that, but I know people who did. I did try to support two startups seventy miles apart, at the same time. I was at the second farm when they finished the second milking on the first farm. I was not at the first farm to remind everyone that the plan included pushing cows for a couple more milkings, so the crew left the barn to get a good night’s sleep and an early start the next morning. We could have gotten way behind, but the farm had done such a good job getting the cows through the robots before startup, that many cows came on their own after two milkings, and we never looked back. Don’t try that at home.

I could tell more stories – cows that didn’t become interested in pellets until after the third milking; a project that involved starting in four phases but they ran out of friends to push cows after the third phase; eating everything from amazing home cooked meals in the evening to last night’s room-temperature pizza at four in the morning. I wouldn’t trade my startup experiences for anything, and I am always happy to share in the planning – and the improvising.