A year or two ago to see the dairy farm supplied with modern equipment and technique, robots and automated software management, one had to go to the Western Europe, the USA, Canada and Israel. Nowadays, we more often appeal to our closest neighbor, Russia, with the farms, which you will not see in any country in the world.

One of these farms is in the Republic of Tatarstan, on a junction of two continents, Europe and Asia, and two religions, Orthodoxy and Islam. Dairy Complex Ltd. “Rahimov’s SEE” is a feather of a cap not only of its owners, the Rahimovs, but of the whole Republic and even country. The farm is unique, indeed. Its main feature is that for a big trade milk production they use a voluntary milking system (VMS), to put it simple, they are just milking robots. There are several similar farms in the world. The biggest of them, with 20 milking robots “Mason Dixon Farms”, is in the USA, two more are in Belarus (12 and 16 robots) and “Rahimov’s SEE” (16 robots) in the Russian Federation. Barns are fully automated, beginning with the climate control, milking and feeding, and ending with manure removal and finishing. Influence of human factor is minimum. Within 24 hours they produce more than 20 tons of milk with 3.8% fatness, 3.4% protein, and the number of somatic cells is less than 150–170 thousand/cm^3.

The idea of fully automated ultra-modern breeding complex came to its present owners in 2007 after their visit to the “Mason Dixon Farms”. When we saw that farm, says Farid Rahimov, one of the owners of the farm, — we were very impressed, we thought, discussed, dreamt and decided to implement a similar project in Russia.

See full version in Milk and Farm Journal, № 4, March, 2010.