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 ...

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 ...

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. – When Doug Reinemann began working in the 1990s as a specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Division of Extension, farmers were moving from pipelines to parlors. And from there ...

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, ...

GLASGOW, Ky. — The cows shuffle in and take their places in the stalls, but there are no milking stools and no buckets here, just cows being milked — by robots. Malvern Hills Dairy at the Mattingly ...