By Neil Munro
Daily Caller
August 9, 2013
GOP budget chief and Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan says he wants to pass a major immigration rewrite because his home-state Wisconsin dairy farmers will go bust without a steady supply of low-wage immigrant workers.
However, those dairy farmers are increasingly hiring robots to milk their cows.
Farmers’ “first reaction is disbelief… [but] once people do purchase them and put them in, it’s definitely a life-changing event,” said Adam Steiner, a robot salesman in Stratford, Wisconsin, for Iowa-based Lely USA Inc.
Without the cow-milking robots, farmers’ lives are tied to their cows’ milking schedule.
“Seven days a week, two or three times a day, every single solitary day, no breaks for Christmas, no breaks for your birthday, you have to milk those cows,” said Gregg Abts, a robot-salesman in New Franken, Wisconsin.
The cows use the new robots when they wish, and the robots only need maintenance every 20,000 milkings, so the farmers are free to set their own schedules, such as attending their kids’ school events while monitoring the milking via their smartphones, Steiner said.[More]