Billy French, who operates French Brothers Dairy in Woodstock, said his family’s farm has always been open to giving tours and fielding questions from the public about how the farm operates.
“There’s a huge disconnect between today’s population and where their food comes from. As an industry, we’ve started in the last 10 years trying to address that,” he said. “My generation, in this area, we all knew or had somebody in our family that worked on a farm. Today’s generation, probably not. There’s so few people here now that can relate to a farming activity.”
Tommy French said the farm has continued to give tours to area students, starting as early as preschool and typically ranging through elementary school. The county chamber of commerce’s leadership program also visited recently.
Tommy said some students are more inquisitive than others, but he feels it’s good for all young students to at least see the process and begin to understand where their food comes from.
For the past six years, a major talking point around French Brothers Dairy has been the two LELY robotic milkers installed there.
On school tours, students stop at around five different stations around the farm. Tommy manages the milking station, showing students how the farm’s two LELY robotic milkers work to extract milk from the farm’s dairy cows.
The machines first clean cows’ udders before latching on and extracting milk from them. The machines also scale out and deliver the cows’ feed according to how much milk they produced, which incentivizes the cows to walk into the milking chambers on their own without having to be herded.
The robot has a 3D camera that coordinates where the cow is standing so it can accurately attach to the cow’s udders.
The two robotic milkers were installed on the farm around March of 2016, becoming the eighth dairy farm in Virginia to install such technology at the time. The move to begin utilizing the machines was mostly labor-driven, Billy French said.
In 2016, he said a milking job paid about $9 an hour, which included split shifts working both in the morning and evening.
“I didn’t have enough full-time work for anybody to have a full shift, so it became two shifts. You just can’t get people to work like that anymore. It became impossible to keep someone very long,” he said. “The cows, they want consistency — the more consistent you can make it, the happier and more productive they are. It was at a point where if we were going to keep going, we had to do something. Now, we’ve paid our labor up front. That’s how we look at it.”
Along with milking the cows, the machines gather data to analyze, which includes health and hormone issues. The machines also keep track of when a cow is likely in heat and if it is ready to be artificially inseminated to breed. Data such as product yield, cow weight, date since the cow’s last insemination or calving, and its stomach ruminations are stored for tracking purposes.
Billy and Tommy said it took about six months to get used to mining through the data to determine which aspects were most useful.
Overall, French Brothers Dairy milks fewer cows than it did prior to installing the robots but the consistency of the robotic milking has produced more milk per cow, Tommy said.
