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At the De Buhr family farm in Grant County, the workers have been getting harder to find.

Cory De Buhr, 48, returned from college in 1994 to take over his family's 240 acres, but his son left to work at a factory in Platteville and plans to go back to school to study diesel mechanics, and his high school-age daughter wants to work in health care.

To milk his 70 cows he's employed a few part- and full-time workers over the years. But hiring has become more challenging — there has been some decline in available immigrant labor and young workers too often spend time fixated on their phones, De Buhr said.

"(Young workers) want more money and that doesn't help either," De Buhr said. In the past few years he raised hourly wages from $8 to $10 an hour, but workers are asking for as much as $14 an hour now, a sign of the tight labor market and the economic reality of how difficult it is to live on less.

So in April, De Buhr cut out the need for two workers entirely by paying $200,000 for a robotic milker produced by GEA Farm Technologies, a German company with a North American headquarters in Naperville, Illinois.