Yeah the new mega dairies have machinery milking and dont care whether its dark or not. I have one nearby and its a sight to watch 400 cows come in and be milked.
There's a dairy operation in NW Indiana called Fair Oaks Farms. It's 9 families that banded together to form one of the largest dairies in the country. They have 36,000 cows.
They've got 10 milking barns that run 24/7/365.
They give tours. It's quite interesting.
From what I recall, there are around 60 calves born there every day. The calves are separated by sex. The males go off to beef producers. Some of the females are trucked to pasture lands in Tennessee and Kentucky, and some are sold to beef producers. When the females in Tennessee and Kentucky are of breeding age, they are artificially inseminated. About a month before they're to give birth, they are trucked back to Indiana. They give birth and the process repeats for the calves, while the cow goes into the milking barn for the rest of her life, which, as I recall, is about 6-7 years. Those milking cows are artificially inseminated again each year, and when they are about ready to give birth, they are moved over to a birthing section of the barn. They give birth and the process repeats.
All of the bedding in the dairy barns is recycled daily and put through a process that squeezes the waste out of the bedding, cleans it, and returns it to the beds. The waste goes through digesters that produce methane. All of the methane is used to run all of the milk delivery semi trucks that go as far south as Georgia, as well as the equipment on the farm. Tractors, loaders, etc. The rest of the methane is run through an electric generation facility to provide electricity for the operations, and the excess electricity is sold to the grid.
They also have a pig breeding operation. A couple hundred pigs are born there every day. As they get weened and up to a certain weight, they are sold to finishers. That's an impressive operation as well.
I forget how many tens of thousands of acres they have under their control to produce feed, but a surprisingly large amount of it is in conservation reserve and wetlands, and not farmed for grain.
If anyone in the midwest hasn't seen such an operation, it's worth the price of admission just to see and understand the scale of the operations. Very impressive. We've been there twice. Once, we sat with a group of Wisconsin dairy farmers. They all said they were glad they were getting out of the business, as it is about impossible to compete with that.
