hese cows are in no hurry. Each just meanders to the dairy, all rolling hindquarters, swishing tails and loping heads, the blue-black and tan Rorschach ink-blot patching of their hides vivid against the washed-out Australian summer light. They stop as they please along the way. Chew cud. Moo. Drop pats. Moo again. They nudge the soft earth or a companion before snorting and continuing on up through the paddocks to the shed.
It’s milking time – just as it’s always milking time in this dairy for about 360 Friesians at Camden, where the outer orbit of Sydney gives way to the gentle rise that becomes the southern highlands. These cows are not held to the human clock and milked according to the dairy farmer’s traditionally antisocial (for both people and cows) timetable, at the crack of dawn and again at dusk. And they don’t have to line up for hours, either, cramped in a race, their udders bursting, in order for a dairy worker to quickly wash their teats, apply the suction cups, extract their milk, disinfect and send them on their way.
Induced to wander to the dairy only by the irresistible promise of fresh pasture beyond, these animals are milked according to a pattern that largely meets their rhythm of grazing, watering, resting and lactating.
They are not herded or cajoled in any way to head for the shed. There are no dogs snapping at stragglers’ fetlocks. It’s rare for people to bother them at all. Indeed, there’s scarcely a person in sight on this dairy farm, situated in the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries Elizabeth Macarthur Agricultural Institute.
There are no people about because, once the cows reach the shed, they effectively milk themselves in what is the world’s first robotic rotary milking dairy. The result of a collaboration between the Swedish dairy equipment producer DeLaval, Dairy Australia and the University of Sydney’s faculty of veterinary science, the Camden property is host to the research-and-development prototype FutureDairy, which can automatically milk up to 90 cows an hour.
Two commercial models of FutureDairy have been operating since 2012 on large-scale Australian dairy farms, one in Tasmania and the other in Victoria. About 36 other commercial farms in Australia employ the smaller-scale robotic technologies of other innovators to do what has hitherto been the backbreaking manual and, later, semi-automated, work of dairy farmers for well over two centuries.
While the name FutureDairy is freighted with prescience for an era yet to be reached, it is, in fact, already arriving and transforming the economies and lifestyles of the early adopters. Its positive implications for dairy production are no less profound for animal welfare and, of course, for the wellbeing of the dairy farmer – a person who, almost invariably, endures the unforgiving rigidities and relentless physical work of milking cows by virtue of birth rather than choice.
No less acute or obvious are the potential ramifications for the dairy farm labourer. On a conventional Australian dairy farm the rule of thumb is one human for about 100 cattle. So, a farm with 400 cows would probably employ four people, nearly three-quarters of whose time is spent milking (the rest would be dedicated to feeding, feed production and animal welfare).
But at FutureDairy each of the cows, once in the dairy yard, moves on to one of 16 milking points on the rotary platform. As the platform gently turns, robotic arms wash the teats and attach the cups. The milk is extracted, the teats disinfected and the cups flushed. About eight minutes later the cow steps off the revolving platform and into a yard, where it receives a feed reward before being allowed into fresh pasture. Each cow is identified by a dongle around its neck that electronically records and transmits the time and volume of its last milking.
Sensors on the drafting gates that separate the dairy yards from the pasture automatically read each cow’s data. Those who’ve been milked too recently are sent back to pasture instead of on to the robotic milker.
The farmer can control all this remotely: checking yields and production mechanics on an iPad and needing to attend the dairy only in case of a malfunction, after an automated phone call or text.
Not a single person needs to touch a cow during any 24-hour milking cycle.
In Australian agriculture you don’t need to imagine the future to be able to see a part of it.
In a decade or two more of the cows than not on big dairy farms will probably milk themselves thanks to systems such as FutureDairy. Roving surface-based machines and drones, with their capacity to efficiently survey and even herd animals from above, will threaten the livelihood of that already dwindling breed, the stockman. Not to mention the kelpie.
Global Positioning Systems technology is already the norm on many farms. Applied to traditional farming equipment such as tractors, harvesters, ploughs and sprayers, it has enhanced labour efficiency and helped curb costly waste by enabling large-scale crop farmers to harvest and spray fields with pesticide and herbicide with centimetre accuracy.
Such traditional, driven machines – even those adapted with GPS – are, however, already threatened with obsolescence. Big, driverless machines, including tractors, will be a reality on some Australian farms this decade. While they will represent an obvious next phase in the evolution of that titan of rural production, the tractor, first commercially introduced to Australia by AH McDonald in 1908, people-less vehicles will not represent the cutting edge of agricultural technology and production.
That will most likely be left to the robots. Robots that can plant, fertilise, spray, weed, monitor and, ultimately, harvest, pack and transport crops will inhabit the countryside. While the drones hum overhead other remotely controlled intelligent surface robots will be able to inspect and herd farm animals (the prototype of one, “the Shrimp”, has already been tested with the FutureDairy herd at Camden).
Australia’s 2013 national food plan outlined a commonwealth ambition to increase by 45% the value of this country’s agricultural and food-related exports by 2025 – a figure that can be achieved only with the continual advent of technologies such as robots. In 2010–11 the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that in just one year the area covered by farming in Australia had increased by 3% to 409.7m hectares, while the land mass dedicated to cropping went up 24% to 32m hectares. About 53% of the continent’s total land mass is used for agriculture.
Inverse to the significant rise in agricultural production, more and more Australians are leaving rural and remote areas for the big cities and urban centres. Almost 89% of us live in major cities and inner regional areas.
Despite Australians’ sentimental and cultural attachment to those vast expanses of uninhabited outback, stock runs, russet fields and verdant crop lines that we romantically generalise as “the bush”, Australians have always predominantly been most comfortable dwelling and working on the coastal, urban plains where most big cities and centres are. While most Australians lived outside the cities at federation in 1901, by 1908 only four in 10 people lived rurally. By 2001, just 14% of Australians lived outside “urban” areas, which the ABS defines as a “population cluster” of 1,000 people.
Despite Australia’s agricultural output as a proportion of the economy being among the highest in the OECD, the number of farmers has been in steady decline since the 1960s as more and more small family operators sold out to large-scale businesses.
According to ABS yearbooks, the proportion of workers employed in Australian agriculture fell from 30.2% in 1911 to 4.3% in 1996. The World Bank recorded a further significant 25% drop to 3.3% in the decade and a half to 2009. During the three decades to 2011 the number of Australian farmers declined by 106,200 or 40%. This translated, in more starkly human terms, to an average of 294 farmers leaving their properties each month.
The human implication of all of this is clear: despite Australia’s reliance on locally produced food and its economic dependence on agricultural exports, the number of small- and medium-sized farmers living off the land is dwindling rapidly. Rural communities all across Australia are shrinking, along with the ancillary businesses and services – main-street shops, doctors’ surgeries, schools, car dealerships, places of worship, community centres and sporting clubs – that have traditionally served them.
Yes, while it produces most of Australia’s food needs, contributes handsomely to gross domestic product and export earnings, the bush is being progressively hollowed out of its people. By the time, in a future this side of the horizon, that the cows are milking themselves – when commercial applications of the Shrimp are herding the sheep and cattle, when few tractors carry drivers, and when robots are tending fields and harvesting apple and pear orchards devoid of people – what will remain of this country’s supposed connection to the land?
The next question, of course, is will Australians in the cities still be willing to spend their taxes on supporting services, including roads and hospitals, the maintenance of the national broadband network, telephone systems and publicly funded transport?
Will the bush be reduced to a vast mechanised place of scant human habitation beyond those specialists who service the robots – a place that exists primarily to service the cities and the export markets?
Non-Indigenous Australia’s emotional nexus with the land – with its roots in masculine pioneering stories and blinkered notions of benign settlement, and for all its subsequent embodiment in the over-mythologised, stylised story of Anzac – is already stretched with the emergence of each new urban generation.
Robots could well see it broken and “the bush” largely reduced to a state of imagination.
In the late 1980s Phil Koschitzke left the family wheat farm at Warracknabeal in Victoria’s Wimmera district to study at university in Melbourne. He returned in 1997 with a doctorate in aeronautical engineering to become the fifth generation of his family to grow wheat on land that his original settler forebears began working in the 1870s. “I suppose I was a farmer who went and got an education – not a doctor who went farming,” he says.
He explains succinctly the constant exodus of farmers from, and the continual amalgamation of, properties in the Wimmera, in the context of the evolution of automation, beginning with the tractor and combine harvester in newly federated Australia. “When this area was settled each farmer was allowed to select 320 acres only,” he says.
“Ever since the original settlement, as farming practices became more automated, the size of farm holdings has continuously expanded about every score [20 years]. For each generation, two farms would combine into one and this trend continues today. My local area had 60 children enrolled at the primary school in my grandfather’s time. Now it’s about a handful of kids in total.”
Institutions adapt accordingly, he says. Or shrink and eventually die.
Sport, including various football codes, women’s basketball and netball competitions – with their legend-forging long historical inter-town rivalries – has traditionally been a community and social glue in the bush. But it’s getting increasingly difficult to field teams, as evidenced by the abandonment at the end of the 2015 season of the Mallee football netball league. This led to the merger of old rivals Walpeup-Underbool and Ouyen United, and the entry of the new club, the Ouyen United “Kangas”, into the Wimmera league. As if to reinforce Koschitzke’s point that a doubling of the size of properties each generation has a corresponding negative impact on social infrastructure, the Mallee league formed in 1997 with the merger of the Northern Mallee and Southern Mallee football leagues.
He says his local Warracknabeal football league is finding it increasingly difficult to field teams, as skilled labourers – especially tradesman, such as electricians and carpenters – are lured to the cities and regional centres by the prospect of steady work and higher pay. “Skilled workers are in demand, but there is a shortage of them because they are all leaving,” he says. “There’s a corresponding dwindling demand for unskilled manual labour, partly as a result of automation.”
Koschitzke uses GPS equipment on his heavy machinery. It has dramatically minimised his fatigue (and, therefore, the risk of an accident), increased his efficiency and lowered costs – especially those associated with spraying. This is due to the capacity of global positioning to minimise duplication or double spraying.
Not surprisingly, Koschitzke does not use robotics, which are largely at the research-and-development stage for broad-acre farming in Australia. But, he says, farmers of all types are becoming increasingly engaged with the emergence of a new generation of smart automated machinery and its potential to further enhance production and efficiencies.
In a report published in June 2015 by the committee for economic development of Australia on the future of the Australian workforce, a research team led by the University of Sydney’s Hugh Durrant-Whyte wrote: “In the next decade, most mines will operate with less than a third of current workforces, with a significant number of these engaging remotely. The same levels of automation are likely to occur in related industries where routine operation is the norm, such as in agriculture.”
A standout example of automating mineral production is Rio Tinto’s giant Pilbara iron ore operations, a world leader in the use of remote-control mining technology. The operations of Rio’s 15 mines, four ports, 1,700km of rail, 180 locomotives, 11,000 ore cars and 361 other giant vehicles in the Pilbara have consistently evolved with increasing automation.
Automation began with train ore dumpers, stackers and, in 1994, robotic product analysis, and now includes autonomous haulage and drilling systems. Since June 2010 the management of individual production components was centralised to Perth, some 1,500km away. “The operations centre produces better, smarter, faster decisions at every level monitoring and controlling the mining, rail and port activities remotely from a single location,” Rio’s managing director of Pilbara Mines, Michael Gollschewski, wrote in his contribution to the committee for economic development’s workforce report.
Of course, mining is not farming. But the research, development and implementation of automated and robotic mine equipment in Australia is distinctly linked to the world-leading contemporary Australian R&D for similar machines intended for this country’s agricultural sector.
Which leads us back to the cows at Camden and the Shrimp – a collaboration between the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Field Robotics and the faculty of veterinary science’s dairy science group.
The director of the field robotics centre, Prof Salah Sukkarieh, consulted on Rio’s Pilbara automation. He is now at the vanguard of making robots to work on farms. “In terms of field robotics – robots that can actually work outdoors – we are becoming international leaders, and the reason why is that so many other industries have been using it,” he says. “In mining, in infrastructure monitoring, in aerospace – we have been able to translate a lot of that knowledge across from Australian industry that already has these systems in place … into the agricultural industry. So we are leading the world, and we are doing some pretty cool stuff in that space.”
In a field close to the Shrimp, you might soon find “the Ladybird”, a ground robot designed for broad-acre vegetable farming. The solar-powered machine is equipped with sensors for measuring vegetable growth, and for the detection of animal and plant pests. It has a robotic arm that can remove weeds and potentially harvest vegetables.
Asked if the Rio experiment was a potential template for the automation of larger-scale farm production, Sukkarieh says: “Yes, well that’s what we were thinking. I mean, it’s a while away because the difference is that Rio Tinto is a large corporation and so can invest heavily in the capital infrastructure … while in agriculture you still predominantly are dealing with individual players.
“But what you can imagine is … a farmer who has … a robot out there doing its task and relaying its information back to the desktop. It might be weeding or it might be fertilising or it might be seeding.”
Will the farms of the near future be characterised by driverless tractors and harvesters, and an array of robots carrying out various tasks instead of humans? “I think so, yes,” he says. “You might be just looking at it from an Australian perspective but we are seeing that all around the world. Every single country has some sort of automation program going on in agriculture. So it won’t be long before we start to see an autonomous farm or a partly autonomous farm operating in some way.”
While the automation of agricultural production and the phasing in of robotics would cost some jobs, it was also a response to shortages of reliable rural labour, he says.
“When you had the mining industry taking all the people it became a lot more expensive to get labour on to the farm and, hence, you are relying a lot more on contractors. Contractors will end up going where the dollars are and so you could have workers on your farm today but not tomorrow. So there is a labour variability that farmers are concerned about and there are labour costs that farmers worry about in those situations.
“When you don’t have a productive mining industry and you end up with greater access to affordable labour, then farmers aren’t really interested in automation any more. And so you kind of go through those cyclic patterns. That’s usually expected in any automation world – it kind of goes up and down but generally the trend over the longer term is that things end up being more automated.