Dr Andi Horvath (reporter)

Welcome to Dookie Campus University of Melbourne Dookie has been central to Agricultural education for over 100 years. Since its doors opened in 1886 many of its graduates have contributed to agriculture in this country. It was set up to be an experimental farm and it still cos today we are going to be visiting a new robotic dairy. So welcome to Dookie campus and welcome to it past present and it future.



Jeanette Powell MP

It gives me great pleasure to declare the hi-tech robotic dairy here at Dookie officially open.



Dr Andi Horvath

The state of the art Robotic dairy has capacity for up to 180 cows to self-milk 2 to 3 times a day. The 3 robots stalls find the cows teats by using a laser detection system. Environmental features include 118 solar panels and wastewater recycling into settling ponds

Dr Brendan Cullen

The technology is quite new in Australia there is a lot of research and development required to figure out how to use these systems to get the best out of then in our pasture based dairy systems. Things like allocating and feeding pasture to cows and how to encourage the voluntary movement s around the system



Associate Professor Brian Leury

What it is allows us to do is to collected cow information but more importantly we couple this with 43 hectares of state of the art irrigation systems so we can use that information to optimize the feeding right through the milking of cows on an individual cow basis.



Professor Ken Hinchcliff

The Dookie dairy represents a huge investment by the University and Regional development Victoria in the Australian dairy industry. That’s important to the Faculty Veterinary and Agricultural sciences because we are strongly commented to advancing the agricultural industry in Australia through the provision of agricultural scientists.

Dr Brendan Cullen

There is opportunity to link in with the National program as well around robotic milking research and development. There is a lot of interest looking at the animal welfare implications of this sort of system. How do cows interact with between each other when they are moving voluntarily around the system, so there are some differences here between a conventional diary so we want to understand those differences.



Jeanette Powell MP

This project is transforming what is Victoria oldest Agriculture College into a leading edge facility; projects like this demonstrate a strong commitment to Agricultural excellence across regional Victoria

Andi Horvath (reporter)

We ask todays students what they are studying and how they see the future



Claudia Bebert

We have so many different subjects to get a good view all different aspects of agriculture, which is nice we do economics we do plants we do a bit of animal nutrition so we get a chance to trail all of them, which is nice.



Nick Monogue

Ag is probably most industry I feel, because we all got to eat and to meet the target of this growing population we going have to produce more.



Andi Horvath (reporter)

The robotic diary represents Dookie campus’s long tradition as a place of research, working with industry as well as being a teaching institution. Todays students are very aware that in the next 40 years we need to double our food production to cater for the Australian and Asian markets, now that’s not just a scientific challenge, todays graduates are willing to take on they know it’s a political economic technological and environmental one as well.