To be perfectly honest I don't have any more time but the guy I laid off (who was doing most of the milking) has a LOT of free time haha.

Seriously - its not so much freeing up time (which the robots definitely do - saves 6hrs/day here) but they make your time more flexible.  Both myself and my main employee have busy kids and a hockey practice at 4:30pm is never a problem - but sometimes I'm back in the barn at 10pm for an hour or two catching up on something I wasn't able to finish earlier in the day.  I also sit on my municipal council and evening meetings are easy to schedule into my day now.  I do have a lot more time to devote to managing the cows - which is a more rewarding and challenging job than hanging cups in the parlor.   On Sundays I am always here alone and if everything is rolling along smoothly and there are no calvings or breedings I might spend a total of an hour in the barn over the course of the day.

I was feeding a single TMR before and it is certainly more complicated to feed with the robots but things are going well - currently feeding a single ingredient in the robot but soon hope to add another bin and ingredient to save a little $$.  There are enough robots out there now that the proper strategies to feed with them has been figured out - an experienced nutritionist goes a long ways.  I followed advice from Lely and also one of their consultants who also robot milks in Manitoba and that has been a big help. I am feeding a TMR in the bunk balanced for 66lbs 4%bf production and top up in the robots with a commercial pellet.  The TMR includes alfalfa silage, corn silage, high moisture barley, canola meal, distillers, protected palm fat and mineral. Cows are producing about 75lbs at 4.1% bf, but there is a lot of stale cows in the herd right now.  My top cow is right at 150lbs/day and there is a bunch around 120lbs.

When we first installed the robots a year ago they were the 4th and 5th of the A4 models for my dealer, the 1st and 2nd are at my friend's farm 15 miles away.  We had a bunch of problems and issues but the longest one unit was down was 5 hours. All the teething pains and issues with the new models appear to have been worked out now and lately (last 6 months or so) things have been a LOT better.  I have not had a robot call since early November or late October its been a while, of course they will probably screw up tonight at 4am haha.  Most of the calls are for very minor stuff like a knocked off hose on the cups or other cow caused issue.  For equipment that runs 24/7 they are very reliable.

I was worried the older cows would be trouble to adapt but that was not the case. Once they figured out that they got that tasty pellet inside that stall some of the old girls took to it in as short as two days.  I have had just as many slow learner heifers as old cows - most learn to voluntarily visit the robots in 4 or 5 days to a week, but a few take a couple of weeks to catch on.  Some old cows really suprised me and some have not - like any barn system the type of cow that works best will eventually end up sticking around but that is no different than the fact some cows excel in tiestall barns and others do better in freestalls with parlors.  I have had to cull a few but they were pretty ugly - the robots can milk some nasty udders but not all of them.  I don't miss any of the cows that got sold - some guys fret if they have to sell a few cows when they get robots but I bought into automation to milk my cows unattended - I have low tolerance for cows that require babysitting.  Probably only sold 4 or 5 cows that might have stayed with the parlor but they would be high maintenance in the parlor also.

I think barn design plays a big role in how well robots work on different farms - the barn needs to be designed for proper cow flow and robot access but also to ease the labor tasks like fetching a few cows. In my barn one person can fetch in 5 minutes and this task is usually performed when cleaning stalls. Fetching and training cows (after the initial few months) hasn't been a big deal - we have gone several weeks without fetching a single cow and usually have to encourage 2 or 3 cows once or twice a day to make thier way over to the robots to be milked. 

One thing I noticed the last time I dried a few cows off - the poor girls were bawling the next day like a bunch of beef cows who just had calves weaned which was something new.  I've never seen cows miss the parlor like they obviously missed the big red Lely 'calves'.