Mepunga dairy becomes southern hemisphere's first robotic operation of its type

Busloads of farmers from as far as America are heading to the south-west to catch a glimpse of the first robotic rotary dairy of its type in the southern hemisphere, owned by farmer Paul Smith and his wife Marsha.

Now in its sixth month of operation, Mr Smith said the robotic revolution was far from "science fiction".

A farmer for 30 years, Mr Smith said when it came to replacing the age-old rotary on his family's farm, he wanted to do things differently.

That entailed installing a robotic rotary capable of producing 17,000 litres of milk each day at a site about 300 metres down the road.

"We're pretty much sitting back, drinking cups of tea and babysitting the machine," Mr Smith said.

"We'd been milking in the family's 50-cow conventional rotary which was about 25-years-old and on its last legs, so a few years ago we started investigating what we'd replace that with.

"I came across a YouTube video five or six years ago about robotic dairies before I even decided to build a new one or anything.

"I thought it was the stuff of science fiction - it was pretty cool that somebody was trying it out, but never gave it much more thought.

"But when we started building the dairy, I remembered that video and found the technology had been growing in popularity.

"They'd since developed it, it was going into other countries and it was a lot bigger project than what it was originally so we started looking at going down that road.

"Conventional rotaries these days were good, but in reality they were still the same thing we built 30 years ago, just with new bells and whistles.

"What we decided to build was not a five-year investment, it was a 25-year investment - we thought if we were going to stick a new dairy in, we needed something a bit more advanced."

Mr Smith said milking cows was the least exciting feature of the GEA Farm Technology DairyProQ.

"The way it works is when a cow walks in, the robotic arm will pop out, the cow gets identified, one cup will look for the teat, attach to the cow and milk it," he said.

"The cup also cleans the teat, takes a sample of the milk and gives us the milk quality too.

"The pulsations stimulate the teat which lets the milk out faster.

"When it's finished it will spray the teat and do all its sanitising inside the cup before releasing the cow."

Mr Smith said while the machine was a "big investment", it was the right choice with the farm requiring minimal labour to maintain a cow herd of up to 800.

"At the moment I have myself and two full-time employees," he said.

"We've been relying on backpacker relief milking for the last six years, but once we get this sorted and up and going properly it's going to remove that need and we can just rely on two full-timers to maintain the whole cow herd.

"I'd need another two full-time staff if not for the robots.

"This is a big investment, it's a multi-million dollar one, but we've looked at the numbers and I'm confident I can pay this back in six to 10 years depending on milk prices and interest rates.

"We're having record milk prices at the moment and the dairy industry is looking up, so we've signed up for another three years at a pretty good contract."

Latest data from Dairy Australia confirmed the industry's outlook was positive.

The region of Western Victoria - comprised of 1028 dairies - produced 1928 megalitres of milk across the 2021-22 financial year, accounting for 22.5 per cent of the national production.

That collective production was valued at $1.065 billion, $54 million more than the previous year, with prices tipped to increase.

But despite those record profits, 41 dairies across the region closed over that same period, with onerous work and a lack of people willing to do it cited as one major reason for the exodus.

Corangamite Shire south-west ward councillor Kate Makin said the shortage of workers meant farmers were increasingly forfeiting their holidays to tend to the land.

Mr Smith said robotics could help to overcome those issues.

"Once we're up and running properly, we can pretty much run at half a labour unit," he said.

"If we do need to hire, having a robotic dairy will be a lot more attractive for prospective workers because you're not manually milking 700 or 800 cows.

"There's about seven per cent of the herd the robot won't cup, so we'll just have to press a button and put it on manual."

Mr Smith said there was always a risk when using machinery, but that could be minimised.

"We haven't had too many things go wrong yet, but it's a machine so there will be problems that require maintenance," he said.

"We saw an opportunity and we went for it, I did a lot of research on it and was confident in my investment.

"If more people do go down this road, we can bounce ideas off of each other.

"We've got quite a few busloads booked in from people who are curious.

"We've been pretty busy with people having a look, most of them are farmers or ex-farmers.

"I've just had a busload from Gippsland, I've got two busloads of 60 American farmers coming to have a look in a few weeks' time.

"I have two discussion groups from Dairy Australia booked in.

"I don't think robotics will be the be-all, end-all for farming, the interest in robotics is ridiculous at the moment so there's going to be a lot more robotic farms out there.

"It'll be interesting in the next 10 years to see what will happen.

"We're the guinea pig, if we can get this to work properly it's going to change quite a few worlds."