An intruder in the flat barn!

Sunday, August 9

Its about 5 a.m. right now and I am unable to sleep.  The robots called me with an alarm at a little past 3 a.m. this morning.   When I went out to the flat barn (our robotic dairy building), still half asleep, I found a cow inside the building with the robots. I had to do a double take, and wipe my eyes to make sure I was really seeing a cow inside the robot room.  She was pushed into a corner, kind of trapped by a robot on the south of her and a robot on the west of her.  There was a concrete wall to the north of her and a very small opening to the east of her.  I had to take the  robots out of service, move them to a different posisiton and open our 4’ wide man door (where we enter) to let her out of the flat barn.  Then I opened the gates to let her back into the corral.  I was fearful that she would not go back to be milked for a while after this experience.  I then went back into the flat barn, put the robots back into operation.  

I was inside cleaning up the robots and the mess the cow had made, trying to figure out how in the crap she got inside the barn.  When I looked over to robot #3, there she was!  T-R # 64 had made her way to the robot that fast and was standing there eating her feed waiting to be milked.  As I watched her being milked, still amazed at how dang cool these robotic milking machines are, I figured she must have slipped down in robot box # 1 and crawled on her knees inside the flat barn.  She was in there for well over an hour before she got trapped in the corner.  I have been wondering for the last five hours if she just stood in the middle of the flat barn watching her friends being milked without any humans around thinking,  “Holy Cow! This is cool!”, and then when she went to get a closer look at something on the robots, both of the robots of 1 & 2 moved together and trapped her in the corner where I found her.  I just smile at how calm she was when I got her out & how quickly she went right back to being milked by the robot.  Gosh- being a dairy farmer is full of adventure.