With wide-eyed fascination, numerous farmers and other visitors continuously toured the new robotic Stateline Dairy north of Morrowville, Kansas, during an open house June 8, held in conjunction with Dairy Month.

The massive new barn, extending 700 feet long and 100 feet houses 600 cows that file through its 10 robotic milkers at the facility on Highway 15, two miles south of the Nebraska border. The dairy is part of the Ohlde Family Farm in Linn, Kansas, which relocated the first set of 300 cows to this new facility in late 2022. They added 300 heifers and bought other cows to reach a total of 600 on-site at 2779 King Road.

“A year and a half ago, this building – which was a beef confinement facility, came up for sale and it was an opportunity,” said Justin Ohlde, one of the family partners, “But there’s no parlor here so there was nowhere to milk the cows. That’s when the idea for the robotic milkers came up.”

Eager to visit a robotic dairy in action, longtime, retired dairy farmer Gene Martin and his wife Anita of Washington, Kansas, spent time crouching down to see how the cows’ udders lined-up with the robotic milkers.

“It’s amazing. I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime,” Gene Martin said while watching the milk flowing into a long tube, then into a milk bucket inside a chamber. “I grew up milking 27 head by hand with my dad, brother and sister before I went to school every morning.”

The robotic system takes 6 ½ minutes to milk each cow. The 10 robotic milkers at Stateline are able to milk 90 cows every hour.

The driving force for robots is reducing labor, said Ross Whorton, manager of Whorton’s Inc., who sells the Lely milking systems.

hard to have people milk many cows. But for smaller farms, the reasons for robotics are usually to spend more time with family,” he said.

While Whorton provides training for dairy farmers new to using robotics, each cow is trained for five days on approaching the robots. After training, they’re able to visit the robot when they want to get milked.

Stateline Dairy has remote-operated sprinklers with motion sensors that keep the cows cool, and it uses an automated feed pusher to push hay toward the bunk.

“There’s a lot of technology here, but cows do all the work,” farm manager Dusty Meier said.

If there’s a technical problem, the robot calls him. The whole goal of implementing the technology at Stateline is to expand the herd, he said.

Regarding whether Stateline Dairy will add more cows to the herd, the answer is possibly.

“We’ll see how this whole process goes,” Ohlde said.

Kansas has approximately 200 dairy farms and 175,000 dairy cows. The Kansas milk cow herd produces over four billion pounds of milk each year, valued at about $700 million.

“Much of the growth in dairy production in recent decades can be traced to innovation in the industry, as dairy operations have learned to improve efficiency and increase production through genetics, nutrition and technology,” said Heather Lansdowne, spokeswoman with the Kansas Department of Agriculture. “Stateline Dairy is a great example of the innovation we see in the Kansas dairy industry.”

In 2022, Nebraska, each cow produced 24,800 pounds of milk. Nebraska has 91 dairies, according to the Nebraska State Dairy Association.