Economics of Small-Scale Dairy Farms Having Robotic Milking

Abstract

Increasing farm size, lack of skilled workers and striving for more flexible working hours have entailed investments in automatic milking systems (AMS). Conventional milking systems (CMS) are replaced by milking robots which decrease the need of human labor in this burdensome work. In the past few years, the number of farms with AMS in Finland, among others, has increased rapidly regardless of small herd size (an average of 24 dairy cows in 2008). At the end of 2008, the total number of farms with AMS was 385, their share being 3.1% of all Finnish dairy farms.