The milking system arrived in 1944, and he left for the Navy shortly after that. I found a photo a few years after his passing of the system he described to me. It was one set of four suction cups and a belt that held the cups on the cow. The milk was pumped into a small portable tank. If you have been to the fair, or even at the Cheese and Dairy Festival, and witnessed a cow being milked, you saw a system that is very similar. They milked this way until the 1960s before expanding to a system that could milk nine cows at once.

Now we use robots to milk cows! I recently got to watch a robot milker in action at the USU Caine Dairy. I was amazed by the milk machine. I never thought I would see anything like this when I was a kid milking with my grandpa. The cow has an electronic collar that tells the computer when the cow was milked last and if it’s time to get grain and be milked again.

Think of it as the self-check-out system at your local store — we find it a convenient and the store also saves on labor. The dairy isn’t too far from that same issue. During the summer, dairies need more help to harvest crops and during the winter they need less help. The robot solves this issue and keeps labor costs down. The computer even monitors how much milk the cow is producing and if there is any issue with the milk or health of the cow before it makes its way to the main storage tank. This is a major advantage as it prevents the milk collected in the main tank from being dumped because of contamination.

I took pictures and video of the experience and had this great idea for a social media post of my grandpa with the milking machine from 1944 and the robot milking next to each other. As I wrote the post I decided this could be more than just a simple social media post. We have come a long way in a short amount of time if you think about how the dairy industry has changed and will continue to change in the future.