(upbeat music) - [Presenter] Illinois Stories is brought to you by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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(upbeat music continues) - Hello, welcome to Illinois Stories.

I'm Mark McDonald, near Carthage, at the Udder Hill Dairy, where, oh, about five years ago, they decided to try something a little bit different.

They decided to try some software, which would computerize this dairy farm and allow robots to milk the cows, and it's an incredible operation.

I think you'll find it interesting, Right now, we're standing next to the feed lot down there.

The dairy parlor is over here, and the way this all gets done is so fascinating, now, if you thought the dairyman worked at four in the morning and late at night, now it's 24 hours a day and it's done by robots.

Well see, this is strictly voluntary for the cows to come in here to milk, isn't it?

I mean, they choose when to come in.

- [Sid] Yep.

So that cow there just choose on her own.

She come in and here to get some feed.

We flavor the feed with candy, or we flavor it to make it like candy.

- [Mark] Uh-huh.

- [Sid] So that she will voluntarily come in here.

- [Mark] And what's what's going on in the process now?

What's the robot doing?

- [Sid] So in this process right here, it's actually cleaning the teats on the cow.

You can see the brush, brush in each teat.

Here we go, and it's actually gonna come back to home here in a minute and disinfect the brush.

And after it disinfects the brush, it's actually gonna go back, clean the udder on the cow again.

- [Mark] Oh, look at that!

Amazing.

So, okay, so it's just disinfected, it's gonna go back and get one of the other teats, I guess.

- It's gonna do all four again, so it does all four, twice.

So it really wants to make sure we have a clean product when we are done.

- Okay.

Each cow has four teat.

- So this is a perfectly normal part of the procedure, - Yes.

- One teat at a time.

- Yep.

- And then once we see that happen, then we'll actually see the milking process begin.

- [Sid] Yep.

- [Mark] And it's the same robot doing that as well, right?

- [Sid] Yep.

So this is the cleaning process, usually takes about two and a half minutes.

It also stimulates milk let down for the cow.

As soon as it's done here, we'll see it come back over to what we call, "home."

And then it's gonna do a laser thing to coordinate where the teats are.

- [Mark] Oh, that's how it takes aim at how to set up the milking with the teat, right?

- [Sid] Yep.

Because every cow can have a different size or shaped udder.

So it's going to do a laser beam right here to make sure, to coordinate exactly where the teats are on his cow.

- [Mark] Okay.

- [Sid] After the laser beam, it's gonna actually attach the teat cups one by one.

There's one.

- [Mark] Two.

Three.

And four.

- [Sid] Yep.

- [Mark] Is this a pleasurable exercise for this animal?

I mean, does she even know that this is happening?

Can she feel it?

- [Sid] So she feels this, yes, of course.

It's really, you know, satisfying to her, because she doesn't want any pressure in her udder, right?

- [Mark] Yeah.

- [Sid] So she relieves any pressure, she lets us collect the milk.

- Yeah.

- But as you can see, she is very interested in the feed (Mark laughs) and the candy.

- That's right.

- She's not paying even attention to what's going on in the milking process.

- She's got her head stuck in there, she's not right, not paying any intention, and that's really what you want, isn't it?

- [Sid] That's exactly what we want.

We want that cow to come in there and eat and be calm, - Yeah.

- And uh, go through the whole milking process.

- [Mark] Uh-huh.

And the milking process takes what?

A couple of minutes?

- [Sid] So the average cow on this farm takes seven minutes and 40 seconds.

- [Mark] Oh, seven minutes, okay.

- [Sid] Seven minutes.

- [Mark] Well now, is there a way that we can open up this, this and see the milk coming in?

- [Sid] Yeah, so that milk is coming in here and actually collected in this weigh jar.

- [Mark] Mmhmm.

So that's actually on a scales, when that cow is done milking, it's going to actually record the total weight and then it will record that weight with that cow.

- [Mark] And so that's how you know, or the machine knows and the computer knows whether this is a normal day for this cow, whether it's producing the right amount of milk, - [Sid] Yes.

- [Mark] And also eating the right amount of food, 'cause that's all tracked as well, huh?

- Yeah, exactly.

So when this cow comes in, it's gonna measure her milk production.

She has an expected amount of milk to produce.

Let's just say it's 25 pounds.

She shouldn't be within one pound of that milk production that it is expecting.

if this below that, by a certain degree, that's actually gonna give us an alarm that says, "Hey, this cow, milk production is off today.

There might be something suspicious."

- [Mark] If the milk production is normal, will this happen twice a day?

- [Sid] If the milk production is normal, So we average, right about three milkings per cow per day.

- [Mark] Oh, three per day.

Okay.

- [Sid] Yep.

That is the herd average.

We can range anywhere from a maximum of six, down to some cows, a one and a half times per day.

But the average is three.

- You know what I'd like to see?

Now we talked about the collar that each cow has, it's very specific.

Show us how this works.

- So this collar right here hangs on the cow's neck.

And this computer chip right here, actually records all the information on that cow.

It's basically like a Fitbit, it tracks her activity everyday.

- A Fitbit.

(laughs) - It tracks her movements.

It has a number on here that corresponds with the robot that keep all, all the information to make sure that cow's amount of milk production, goes back to this cow's number.

So this little computer chip right here is very vital to each cow.

- Uh-huh.

- And has a number that's very specific to each cow.

that's recorded in the computer.

And that's how everybody kind of talks to each other.

As far as the cow talks through the robot.

- Mmhmm.

And it not only tracks the amount of milk like you said, but it tracks everything about that cow.

Like, it knows its temperature.

It knows how much it's had to eat.

It actually knows when it's ready to breed, too, right?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

So like I said, as far as activity, we call it the activity monitor, it tracks the activity, and when this cow, and when she becomes in heat, and is ready for insemination, her activity will go up 20, 30, 50%.

So her activity has gone way up.

Actually the robot will move a gate and actually direct this cow to what we call our management panels.

It also records what we call her rumination or how many minutes a day she eats specifically.

- [Mark] Mmhmm.

- [Sid] So this sets on a muscle on her neck.

And every time she takes a bite, chews her cud, It's gonna record those minutes.

- [Mark] (laughs) Wow!

- [Sid] The herd average is about 500 minutes a day.

It's how long our cows eat.

That's how much time of day they spend, - [Mark] Yeah.

- [Sid] 500 minutes a day eating or chewing their cud.

- [Mark] My goodness, that means you have to prepare a lot of feed.

- [Sid] The average cow eats about 110 pounds of feed.

- [Mark] Oh, my good-- not in a day?

in a day?

- [Sid] Yes.

- [Mark] What does one of these animals weigh?

- [Sid] They probably average 1300 pounds a cow.

- [Mark] 1300, and they eat 100 pounds of food a day.

- [Sid] 110 pounds.

- [Mark] Wow.

That's amazing.

Now let's talk about food again.

She's got her head buried in this, here, and what you do here is you actually prepare, you sweeten that, so that they wanna come into the milking parlor, right?

- [Sid] Yup.

Yup.

So the food that she's eating, she is getting, you know, the robot that's feeding her will actually flavor it with cherry and apples and we call it, you know, we want to make it, We call it candy.

So we want that cow to want a piece of candy all the time.

Just like a kid going to candy store.

They want a piece of candy.

- Yep.

- So that is the whole trick to get her to come in here voluntary, is to get another piece of candy, right?

Get another piece of candy.

But that feed is also very important.

It has a lot of nutrients, energy, protein.

So that each cow gets a different amount of feed in the robot, based all based on milk production, the highest producing cows can get up to 26 pounds of feed per day.

The lowest producing cows are down to two pounds.

- Aha.

- So it is very efficient.

- Yeah.

- We only feed the high producing cows a lot.

The low producing cows are fed less.

- Mmhmm.

- So, very efficient.

- Yeah.

And this robot also knows if this cow is ready to eat and milk, because, if that cow's not ready to milk, it won't give it food, will it?

- Exactly.

So as we can see on a different video, probably that, if she come in here, let's just say, she leaves, and she voluntarily comes back in here an hour from now, and want a piece of candy.

It's going to identify that cow and say, "hey, you was just here an hour ago."

(Mark laughs) "I'm opening the gate and gonna let you leave."

- [Mark] That's right.

So she takes off.

- [Sid] No candy for you this time.

(Mark laughs) - [Mark] Well, Nate, how many are in the herd?

- [Nate] Well, right now we're milking about 179 right now, that are wet and milking.

- [Mark] Is that sort of the size of the herd you like to keep?

- It is.

So that's kind of where we, we like to stay in that amount of cows.

Yeah, our facility is well-suited for that.

And it really fits our operation pretty well to stay in that, about that number.

- And you can make money with that number.

- We can make money at that number.

And as long as we keep our efficiencies up and keep track of what we're doing and a lot of the efficiencies are coming through the machines for that extra, feeding the best cows more, and the poor cows less because every herd has those.

- Mmhmm.

- So, and another way to increase our efficiencies is we try to grow almost all of our own forages.

So in here's what, we've got corn silage in here that we've grown on farm, that we try to have it processed the very best possibly as we can, to get the very most out of it.

We also feed them wheatlage in there, it's also grown on farm.

So naturally we put the wheatlage up and we put it into TMR, and then we have-- - Hey, what's TMR?

- A Total Mixed Ration.

- Oh, okay.

- We have a big wagon that, you put all the ingredients in.

And our goal is, complete consistency of the ration everyday.

So, we have a nutritionalist that balances this ration for the cows.

He does the work for the corn silage and the wheatlage.

It's also mixed with bean meal, protein sources and mineral mixes.

In that also comes, it goes into the TMR for a consistent ration.

And then we provide that, we want to provide the cows with a consistent source of feed every day.

And our goal is for every bite of feed to be exactly the same as the last one.

And how that happens is, is doing a good job with the processing of the feed 'cause there's a lot of corn that comes in the corn silage also, and to get the cows to get the most out of that corn, it needs to be processed properly.

- Gotcha.

But most of those corn and the wheat are grown right here on this farm.

- Yes, my brother and I, and family, we farm in our own land.

So we are all self-sufficient on the corn and the wheat side.

And then we also use an inter-nutrient management plan to re-fertilize, to help grow them products also.

- [Mark] Yeah.

And you know, we were talking about this Fitbit, like, this collar that the cows wear.

And I know Sid said this, but I still find it unbelievable.

It's recording every mile, every time a cow takes a chew, right?

- Yes it is.

- So that's how you know how much they're eating, and whether they're eating the right amount for them.

- That's exactly right, because, that consistency of that feeding, goes back to here.

And those rumination minutes, as what we call those, they are kind of forecasting the milk production for the herd and the rumination minutes are telling us how good a job we're doing processing and providing the feed, 'cause the cows ultimately give us the answer every time.

'Cause they tell us what they like and they don't like, so if the rumination minutes go down, then, that's telling us that we've done something that they don't like.

- Mmhmm.

- And typically when the rumination minutes go down, in the heat and outside environment will have a huge impact on that also, but we try to do everything with the fans, with the cooling, the misting, - Yup.

- To overcome that, to try to keep them comfortable, happy cow.

- Yeah.

These are all Holsteins, right?

- We do, we have all Holsteins in our herd, yeah.

- [Mark] And, and, and, this summer has been pretty great because it hadn't been that hot, isn't it?

I mean, you're pretty comfortable.

- [Sid] Yeah.

they've had their stretches where they've been stressed by the heat, but typically it hasn't been as long a stretch as it has been some years.

So as a whole, we're doing pretty well.

- [Mark] And how was your corn crop this year?

I imagine it's pretty good, isn't it?

- We think we have an above average corn crop right now.

- Terrific.

Terrific.

That means you're going to have a good year probably because unless something really goes wrong with the herd, you're set.

- Yeah.

Well we like to think so.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- So, - Thank you for the visit.

- You bet.

Thank you, nice to meet you.

- Yeah, you too, yeah.

- Sid, we were talking about 110 pounds of food feed per day per cow, that's 180 cows.

- Yep.

- That's a heck of a lot of feed.

These bins down here or these bunkers, I think you call 'em.

- Yep.

- This is how you know, how much you got left for the year, right?

- Yeah.

- And this is silage, is this corn silage, here?

- [Sid] That's corn silage in this pile right here.

- Yep.

- Yep.

Yep.

- [Sid] We are getting ready to cut corn silage again for this year, that's usually the second or third weekend in August, - [Mark] Uh-huh.

- [Sid] And as you can see, this bay right here is empty, there's another empty bay on the north.

- [Mark] Mmhmm.

- [Sid] So we are getting ready to fill these three bays with corn silage.

- Uh-huh.

- So we will make, enough feed in two days for a year's worth of feed.

So we're going to make somewhere around, 2,600 to 3000 ton of corn silage is our goal.

- And you need to know the precise time when to cut that corn, don't you?

'cause it matters.

- Very, very important that the dry matter, the moisture of the corn, 'cause we're going to take the whole plant, from the whole plant, we're going to chop it up and all these little bitty pieces, - And grind it, yeah.

- And we want the correct moisture.

You want the correct moisture for the ensiling process to keep the silage and also to get the correct energy value of the corn, you want the maximum value out of that corn you can, - [Mark] Mmhmm.

- [Sid] but yet you want to harvest it at the right window.

The harvest window is very, very important to us because we're relying on a year's worth of feed, - [Mark] Uh-huh.

- [Sid] to get that done.

- [Mark] Now, let's go to the wheat bin up here, The wheat bunker.

- [Sid] Yep.

- This, you cut in the spring, so you got a lot of it left.

- [Sid] Yeah.

So this bunker here is what we call a wheatlage.

We cut this right about the middle of May this year.

And as you see, we're not that far into it, but we will, by, you know, the first of May or end of May, this coming spring, - Mmhmm.

- This will be empty.

- [Mark] Nate was telling us that you also add, a nutritionist helps you add what you need in addition to this, and that's what these bins are behind us, - Yup.

- Is that right?

- Yep.

So we work with a nutritionist from Big Gain.

He takes over feed, forage, analysis, he puts it all together, and in these bins here, we have different products, one of them is like a mineral base.

One of them is a protein base, - Uh-huh.

- And one of them, sometimes is corn, we're currently not feeding any more corn, but, so these bins here keep our commodities that we actually don't raise on the farm.

- [Mark] And then you take all this together and there's a bin up there that you, like, in this kind of like a washing machine, - [Mark] And then it mixes it up, right?

- Yep.

- You put it in, you have some kind of a boom that puts it into the top of that thing.

Falls down, you fill it up.

- [Sid] Yep, yep.

- [Mark] What does it do?

Turn over?

- [Sid] So it sits there and mixes it inside that, inside what we call the feed mixer is two drums that kind of resemble a washing machine drum.

And it sits there and turns that feed, so as we're adding the corn silage, we have a computer program that determines, "Hey, we need to feed this amount of corn silage today.

We need to feed this many pounds of wheatlage today."

This many pounds of mineral, this many pounds of protein supplement, our nutritionalist helps us put it all together.

And then we bring it down, we mix it all together, in what we call a feed mixer.

- [Mark] Yeah.

- And then we deliver that to the cow, that's roughly 18 to 20,000 pounds per day of forages.

- [Mark] That big bin that's one day's worth?

Is that one day's worth of feed?

- [Sid] That's one day's worth of feed, yep.

- [Mark] (laughs) Wow!

What an operation.

- [Sid] Yeah, it takes a lot of feed.

- We'll see it if you've got a really good cow, and you're milking that cow on and off, for what, maybe five, six, seven years?

Something like that?

- Yeah, we got an average of three to four years.

I've worked in cows that made five.

- Of lactation years.

- Yep.

Lactation years, yep.

She'll be approximately seven years old.

- So, you here gotta have a future, right?

And the way you have a future is by bringing on these little ones.

And you do that here too.

- Yep.

- [Mark] You do the breeding here, too, don't you?

- [Sid] Yep.

So all the cows here are artificially inseminated.

And so the better percentage of our cows, what we call the top 50%, we breed to sex semen.

So as you can see right here, this calf with the blue tags, - [Mark] Yeah.

- [Sid] That is a heifer calf.

That calf, we're going to raise that, And she is, in approximately two years from now, she's going to have her first calf, and she's going to join the milk herd.

- [Mark] Okay, how old is she now?

- [Sid] I'd have to look her up.

she's probably around two weeks, I believe, my guess.

- [Mark] Wow, she's big for two weeks.

- Yep.

- And she'll enter the milking herd when?

- [Sid] When she's roughly two years old, - Two years old, okay.

- 24 months, yep.

- So you get a two-year period there where you're not really getting anything out of 'em, - but they need to grow and mature enough, you used an interesting term.

Let's walk down this way a little bit to see some more of them.

You said, did you say sex semen?

- Yes, so, - How does that work?

- Yeah, so the semen company that we buy, purchase semen off of, they can separate the female from the males.

So we purchased the female, eggs or whatever, the female seamen, and we breed it to the cow, So that way we get a heifer calf.

So, you know, we pick our best cows.

We breed them to sex semen, so that we get a replacement heifer calf out of our best cows.

- You know you're gonna get a female?

- It's 90, over 90%.

- That's a remarkable.

- Yep.

Yep.

- Okay.

And so, and if you were to use bulls, of course you would never know what you're gonna get.

- Yeah, you might have the best cow in your herd have a bull calf.

- Yeah.

- And then to us, that bull's never gonna produce milk.

- Right.

- So it's, we've lost that, - Is there any market for a bull calf?

- There is market for them, the bull calves do enter the veal market, or they enter the meat market.

- Mmhmm.

- You know, it was like, yeah, their beef.

- So you don't keep any bulls on the farm at all.

- We don't have any bulls here, no.

- Okay.

there are no use for 'em, 'cause you're a dairy farm.

- Yep.

- You want the milk, is what you want.

- Yep.

- Okay, and so you artificially inseminate all these, does it matter what time of year you do that?

- [Sid] No.

So we artificially inseminate, probably almost every day, some cows you artificial inseminate once, sometimes it takes four to five times, but the average insemination is right about two inseminations per cow to get her pregnant.

- [Mark] Mmhmm.

- [Sid] Yup.

- [Mark] Okay.

And she can give birth for how long, I mean, is there must be a period where she's, she's not fertile anymore or she's not, - Well, actually, cows can be fertile all the way up till the end of their life cycle.

- Really.

- So, I mean, some cows, if you get a good cow that stays in herd a long time, it wouldn't be unusual to have seven or eight calves out of a cow.

- Okay.

And you said lactations.

There's a period between the time they give birth and the time that you can start taking milk from them again.

Is that right?

- Yeah, so when the cow, that the whole milking process starts at birth, right?

So the cow gives a calf, it signals her body to produce milk.

At that point, we start milking the cow.

And for the first four days, we can't sell that milk.

'cause it's called colostrum.

We actually take that milk, and we'll feed it to the bottle calves.

We feed it to her own baby.

- Okay.

All right.

So after four days, then you can start using, that goes into production, that milk goes into production.

- After four days, we're able to sell that milk for, - Uh-huh.

- for human consumption.

- Okay, then how long do you want to milk the cow before you inseminate her again?

- So we usually wait at least 60 days, 60 to 90 days, depending on the cow between her first insemination.

So, you know, the cow starts producing, at day 60 to 90, that's our goal, we want to artificially inseminate that cow sometime in that timeframe.

- [Mark] Uh-huh.

Okay.

And then, from that period of time, is she not producing milk anymore or can-- - [Sid] No, she continues to produce milk.

So she continues to produce milk from the time that she has her first calf, - [Mark] Mmhmm.

- [Sid] And then she gets pregnant, she continues to produce milk, and she can continue to produce milk for several days, we have some cows producing milk for 500 days straight, Right, maybe they didn't get inseminated or didn't get pregnant right away.

- [Mark] Yeah.

- But our goal is to have that cow pregnant between 60 and 120 days.

- Mmhmm.

- So then, she's carrying a calf, still continuing to produce milk.

- Mmhmm.

- And 60 days before she has that baby, we will actually dry her off, give her a break.

She goes up with a different group of cows.

She does not produce milk for 60 days.

We call it a dry period.

It resets the cow.

And then as she comes in with her second calf, that starts a whole another lactation.

- Can we go see where you collect all this milk?

And now, 'cause I imagine it goes into some tanks, - Yep.

- And then the dairy, of course has to come pick it up.

So can we see where that happens?

- Yep.

We can go in the other room here and we have two tanks where the milk's going.

- Okay.

Good - Yep.

- [Mark] Okay, Sid, 24 hours of day, you've got an opportunity to be milking cows, the robot-milked cows.

It's got to end up somewhere, and that's what these huge tanks here are, right?

- [Sid] Yup.

Yup.

So these, these storage tanks right here, actually go through the wall and are on the exterior too.

So the milk is collected from the cow.

It's pumped up here, put in the storage tank and it is immediately cooled down to 41 degrees to keep anything bacteria from growing or anything.

Just the same as your refrigerator.

- [Mark] How many gallons are we talking about here?

- [Sid] So, the milk hauler comes every day, usually seven o'clock in the morning.

And he's usually right on the dot.

(Mark laughs) He is going to pick up from 16 to 1700 gallons a day from us.

- [Mark] Wow.

Every day.

- [Sid] Every day.

- [Mark] That makes you a big producer, doesn't it?

- [Sid] Oh, we are actually just average.

- Really?

- Yeah.

- [Mark] That seems like an awful lot.

What's this tank for?

- So this tank is what we call our buffer tank.

So since the robots work 24 hours a day, the milk hauler has to quit adding milk if he's gonna collect it, right?

- Right.

So he, the milk hauler will divert the milk.

Instead of the storage tanks, he'll divert into our buffer tank.

- Oh.

- It'll stay in there while he collects the milk, while tanks do an internal cleaning.

Once everything's done, it will divert the milk from the buffer tank into the cooling tank.

- Okay, so, there's a period of time between the time he empties these out and they're automatic, the robots or the system cleans them out.

Then you can reintroduce the milk again, - Yep.

- When they're done.

- [Sid] Yep.

The milk hauler starts the process.

He takes the milk, it'll start the cleaning process.

So then the computer takes over, controls the cleaning cycles of everything.

Once it knows the tanks are clean, it diverts the milk here into the clean, fresh storage tanks.

- [Mark] We've mentioned the computer a lot during this.

Can we look at your computer system?

- [Sid] Yep.

Yep, We can go in there and that's where all the data is.

- Yeah, oh man.

- Sid, without this remarkable software, you'd be a dairyman like, a generation ago, right.

But it's a little different.

It's a lot different.

- Oh yeah.

We, you know, keeping track of your information on your livestock is very important.

If we didn't have our data collection center, you know, we would be just a pile of paperwork that would probably get lost.

Maybe if I wouldn't get done.

- This is a remarkable, these meters, show you the entire herd, don't they?

Just pick out the first two there, and describe to us what it's telling you.

- [Sid] Okay.

So this one, log right here, is the total pounds of produced by a group of cows.

- [Mark] Mmhmm.

- [Sid] And then, we got all the things like right down here is the free time.

That's the percentage of time that the robots aren't working.

So, we want that number to actually be 10 to 15%.

- [Mark] Mmhmm.

- [Sid] Here's the number, what we call rumination minutes.

So that's how many minutes a cow a day is eating, as you can see if the needle is above, straight up.

- [Mark] That's for the whole herd though, right?

- [Sid] That's the whole herd average.

Yep.

- Okay.

All right.

- Yep.

- [Mark] So you want them eating, what, about 50% of the time?

Is that good?

- Well, we want eating, our goal is 500 minutes a day, and right now we're just a little bit under that goal just because of the hot weather.

- So cows just don't eat as much when it's hot.

- Mmhmm.

- Yep.

- What else, is fascinating there.

- So we've got some milk speed.

This here is how fast the milk is collected that each cow can vary on that one.

We obviously have over here, we have the number of visits a day.

- [Mark] Oh, that's to the robot.

- [Sid] That's to the robots.

- [Mark] Okay.

- [Sid] So we have just right under 500 visits today.

- [Mark] Mmhmm.

- [Sid] And that's in all three machines.

- [Mark] Now you can also bring up that same kind of depth of information on each cow in the herd, right?

- [Sid] Yup.

Yup.

So if I wanna go over here, I can pull up this, any individual cow, and I'm gonna pick this cow right here.

So this page right here, gives a whole overview of this cow.

- [Mark] Mmhmm.

- [Sid] So I could go on all these tabs and it would give any information all about that cow, but I'm gonna click on this one.

- [Mark] Okay.

And that is called the activity graph.

- [Sid] This is the activity graph.

So I, we was talking earlier about, how that, collar or the computer chip is tracking her activity, her rumination and all this stuff.

So it was a lot of information in this graph, here we go.

So as you can see in this graph, the dark blue line, - Mmhmm.

- That is her activity.

So that you can see every time that she got up to go eat, every time she laid down and chewed her cud, right?

And as we can see right here, something happened, something went way off the charts that cow came into heat.

So we actually inseminated her the day after.

And then, she became pregnant off that.

- [Mark] Okay, so when that spikes like that, did you know that with that she had gone into heat?

- [Sid] We did not visually see that, but the robot picked it out.

- [Mark] So that means she's getting frisky, I guess, right?

- [Sid] Oh yeah, she's just chasing the other cows around and she's feeling good, yep.

- [Mark] Okay.

And that's when you know to inseminate her, and bango!

it worked, didn't it?

- [Sid] Yep, the computer knew, the computer picked it out that she needed to be inseminated.

- [Mark] Mmhmm.

- [Sid] It actually moved that cow.

- [Mark] Mmhmm.

Fascinating.

So you know all about your herd just by going to this, this computer program.

- [Sid] Yup.

Yup.

Anything that we want to know about any individual cow or the herd, It's all right here.

- That is super.

Thank you for the tour.

- You're welcome.

- This is a real eye-opener, - Yeah.

- I appreciate it so much.

And I think your, your operation here is called the Udder Dairy Farm, or, - Udder Hill Dairy.

- Udder Hill Dairy.

- Yep.

- If you're like me, the next time you pour that glass of milk, you'll have a completely different perspective.

From the Udder Hill Dairy, near Carthage, I'm Mark McDonald.

Thanks for watching.

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