In 2007, the Hallgrímssons rebuilt their barn from the ground up, spending kr160 million ($1.46 million) on technologies such as milking robots, an automatic feeding system, and cleaning robots. The investment quickly paid off, says Aðalsteinn’s son, Einar örn Aðalsteinnson. Within a year, their 80 cows were producing 30% more milk and the rate of infections had plummeted, cutting the farm’s veterinarian bills from kr2 million a year to under kr0.5 million. [...]
When one of their cows wants to be milked, she walks to the center of the barn to one of the three self-milking Lely machines. She enters the machine—a gated, cow-size booth—and first has her teats inspected and cleaned. Next, the robot attaches its equipment to extract her milk while the cow chows down on some cow candy: tasty corn pellets supplemented with various vitamins and minerals. The whole process takes 10 minutes or less.
The door to the barn is left open unless the weather is bad, leaving the cows free to wander outside to graze in the pasture. If they’d rather, they can relax on their 2-inch-thick foam mattresses, which are lined up in a tidy row along one side of the barn. There’s a massage machine when they want to scratch that itch on their back, and fresh grass or hay is always available, delivered via an automatic feeding system. Robots scurry around cleaning the barn, with cow poop dispatched through slats in the floor to be automatically gathered as manure for the farm. An AC system, controlled by a weather station on the roof, automatically opens and closes the windows, ensuring fresh air (which is very important to the operation, says Einar). Another computer-commanded machine feeds milk to the baby calves.
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