[fiftyfifty]

I've helped with an IT project for several large dairies in the US (1,000+ cows each). Like you said the cows practically milk themselves. They walk by themselves into the milk barn, one person attaches the automatic milking machines to each cow as they walk into a stall. The milking machine automatically drops off the udders when the cow is done being milked and they walk back out to their pen on their own. I was told the cows like to be milked because it's uncomfortable for them when they are full of milk. Most dairies milk their cows 3 times a day around the clock. One of the dairies I've been to has a round milk barn with a rotating floor with about 100 milking stalls around the outside edge, so the guy attaching the milking machines to the cows doesn't even have to move. By the time the cows rotate all the way around the building they are done, the milking attachments drop off and the cows walk out the door on their own and go back to their pens to eat. I've shown up at these places a few times unannounced and spent 30 minutes walking around looking for a person (other than the guy in the milk barn) to let me into the office. Many times there's two people at the entire dairy: the guy in the milk barn and a guy driving a tractor that drops the feed for the cows along the sides of their pens. Each pen has artificial wood floors kind of like trex decking material and sprinklers in the roof of the pen that run automatically several times a day to wash away the poop which drains into holding ponds. The holding ponds have machinery just like a waste water treatment plant: the solids settle to the bottom of the ponds, and the water is used for corn crops that are fed back to the cows. The manure is dredged from the holding ponds, dried, and distributed on the fields with tractors to fertilize the corn. The majority of food fed to the cows is corn silage, which is the entire corn plants ground up and composted/fermented in large covered piles for a while to make it easier for the cows digest. This makes the whole setup fairly self sustaining. If they need to, the dairies will buy feed, but they try to minimize that because it increases their expenses. Most of these large dairies own thousands of acres around the dairy that is almost entirely dedicated to growing corn to feed the cows. After being to these kinds of setups it's clear to me that there's no way a small operation could compete. If they could replace those last two employees with machines, they would.