AFP, Kemberg :
Fresh from a massage, the cows turn slowly on a computerised “milking carousel”-everything is ready at the Heideland farm south of Berlin to ramp up production once European milk quotas end on Wednesday.
“Look how well we treat them, all the space they’ve got, and here they even have a massage machine,” says Richard Reiss, head of the giant farm of 1,200 dairy cows.
Dairy farmers like Reiss in Germany, Europe’s biggest milk producer, are happy to see the back of the production limits that have prevented them from exploiting the export opportunities offered by the rising middle classes in Asia.
“As soon as we heard that Brussels was considering scrapping the quotas, we started thinking about how to respond,” says the red-faced septuagenarian.
“Since 2012, we’ve done nothing but prepare for this,” adds Reiss, saying that 8.0 million euros ($8.7 million) have been invested in the past two years to increase efficiency and the potential to ramp up output.
That includes the highly automated “milking carousel” that allows the cows to be milked three times per day instead of the normal two, and methane-capturing systems to generate energy for the farm.
The race for productivity includes pampering the cows a little-passing along a spinning brush at the end of a metal arm a couple of times appears to make them happy.
