Description: Department Seminar

Location: 368A Heady Hall

Contact: John Crespi

Title: Precision Dairy Farming, Robotic Milking, and Profitability in the United States

Abstract: Modern precision dairy farming, including a wide array of sensors, data analytics, and automation technologies like robotic milking, help operators implement cow level—rather than herd level—management practices. Use of one or more of these technologies can reduce average costs and increase milk yields per cow. USDA’s Agricultural Resource Management Surveys show that U.S. adoption of precision dairy technologies related to milking, breeding, and data systems increased steadily between 2000 and 2021. This report provides aggregate estimates using detailed data from a representative sample of U.S. dairy farms to understand the profitability impacts of adopting precision dairy technologies. We classify and overview several precision dairy technologies, while documenting their increasing use relative to conventional technologies and the characteristics of operators and farms that use them. Building on this information, we develop a model to estimate the impacts of precision technologies on dairy profitability, controlling for farm size and infrastructure, demographics, high speed internet access, and other factors. The analysis is the first to quantify that the use of more than one non-robotic milking, breeding, or data systems technologies affects dairy farms’ net returns. Robotic milking has a similar effect on farm profit.