CHICORA — A cow steps up, and a mechanical arm reaches under its udders.

A camera mounted on the arm shines a red light on its targets. The machine knows exactly which cow it’s about to fondle. It knows, down to the second, the last time the two of them had such an encounter, exactly how much product each particular teat had offered up and precisely how long it took its suctioning hose to suck out all its milk.

Davis Dairy, a dairy farm in Chicora, has Butler County’s only automated cow milking robots, the Davis family believes.

Removing the human element from the milking process may sound wrong to the classical dairy farmer, but advocates for machines like the one employed at Davis Dairy argue that it frees cows from the one-sized-fits-hundreds monotony of typical modern dairy farming. Alan Davis said he believes the machines are nicer for the cows.

“Before you had to milk all the cows twice a day, all at the same time,” Alan said. “This is a machine that runs around the clock. It gives the cows the freedom to milk whenever they want.”

The system also saves a tremendous amount of man-hours. Milking the herd previously took three people about eight hours. Today, just one person can handle all the regular upkeep duties in about six to eight hours while the robots do their thing.

Read more about Davis Dairy and their robotic milking system in Monday’s Butler Eagle.