Picture this: A dairy barn full of cows being milked, fed and cleaned up after, but there’s no farmer in sight. Sounds a bit unusual, right? Well, it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. Thanks to ...

“I wonder where the farmer is,” remarks my guide, Jan Jacobs. Jacobs doesn’t seem especially worried, though—the several hundred cows in this barn are being well cared for by a small fleet of fully ...

DECLO — More than 1,000 dairy cows will move out of Heglar Creek Dairy’s conventional barn in September and into a new robotic milking barn where they will sleep on waterbeds. In the voluntary milking ...

MADISON — A spotted black cow shuffles toward the stainless steel crate in the center of a dairy barn and eases into it through an open gate. As the door swings shut, a robotic arm moves into action, ...

Chad Kieffer, a third-generation farmer from Utica, Minnesota, has five milkers for his herd of 350 cows. The milkers are squat, patient, persistent workers. They hum around the mooing cows. They are ...