Dairy cows have some really bad habits. They can be terribly messy. They toss the feed they have in front of them and throw it out of reach, just like little children do. It’s called feed tossing behavior. They toss it away with their nose.

If you’ve been in a Pennsylvania bank barn, or the other types of large barns that were constructed throughout Ontario in the early part of the last century, you’ll see that carpenters in those days build an enclosed feed manger. The mangers were about three feet wide and had a front that was about three feet in height and built out of lumber or cement.

The enclosed mangers were good when feeding grain and silage as it prevented the cows from tossing feed where they couldn’t reach it. It wasn’t a cure when feeding hay because they could easily whip the hay over the side – especially flakes of baled hay.

The enclosed mangers had disadvantages. Farmers couldn’t just dump a wheelbarrow full of silage into the manger. It had to be forked in. The enclosed mangers were harder to clean out.

As I recall, mangers were left open in most barns constructed after the 1950s when corn silage became popular with dairy farmers. Silage was easy to dump in front of the animals and it was a simple task to remove any coarse leftovers. But the one disadvantage was mangers had to be swept with a broom during the day when the cows were eating. When cows toss feed away they must reach ahead to get it with their tongue. That wears the bolts in a stanchion tie system and the bolts wear thin and eventually break off.

Some cows also throw feed along their side and over their back while eating.

I always spent 5 to 10 minutes in the dairy barn before retiring for the night – something my father always did when I was a kid. I’d sweep in the last bit of remaining feed and check the cows for signs of heat (for breeding A.I.).

If a cow was restless, that meant something. I considered it good quality time spent with the cows. It meant going out in the cold for a walk to the barn at around 9 or 10 p.m. Most of the cows would be lying down and content as sleeping children. Water was always shut off at night in case there was a broken water bowl during the night. That way no flood waters greeted me in the morning.

My parents had a saying in Dutch that went something like "brushing and polishing cows is as important as feeding them."

Brushing and polishing milking dairy cows isn’t done like it was in the olden days. Most large dairy herds are housed in large free-stall barns and are never brushed.

Feed tossing is also a problem in the free-stall barns. Some farmers have a little tractor with a front blade angled and they drive up and down the feed alley pushing the feed back in.

A robot feed pusher is now available in Canada. It weighs 575 kilograms – 500kg of that is a cement block for weight. Lely, the Dutch company that developed the Lely Astronaut robotic milking system, developed the spaceship-shaped Juno. Lely says Juno can be programmed to move up and down the feeding passage regularly through the day or night, pushing silage up to the feeding cows. When power runs low, it simply returns automatically to a recharging point and links up there until its 12-volt batteries are fully charged.

I called the Lely office to find out the price of this new invention.

It’s around $25,500. The 500 kg cement block gives the machine enough weight to push high feed piles of silage closer to the feeding cows.

Lely says the feed pusher saves time and gives farmers the flexibility and freedom to devote their energy to other tasks.

Other tasks? But maybe it’s also for the dairy farmer who doesn’t want to spend all that quality time with his cows – but with his family, you know, maybe playing hockey, curling?