The Playbook

If your work has a fixed daily shape, look at it this morning. Not whether a machine could do your tasks, which is the question everyone asks and the least useful one. Ask instead whether your job exists partly because somebody has to be somewhere at a particular hour. That is what went on this farm. The milking still happens. The appointment does not.

If you run a business, the question from this edition is not whether to buy something. It is whether you would change anything if you did. The farms getting the most out of these machines rebuilt the building around them. The evidence across British industry is that most firms buy the tool and leave the process alone, and that those firms get very little back. Buying is cheap now. Reorganising is the expensive part and always was.

If you employ people in a sector that cannot recruit, notice the order of events here. This farmer did not replace people he had. He replaced people he expected not to find. Labour shortage is doing more to drive automation in Britain right now than labour cost is, and the two lead to different places.

If you want to check us, the one number in this edition we would most like challenged is the headcount: twelve and a half full time posts down to nine, on one farm, from the farmer himself. If you know a British dairy farm with a before and after, we would like to hear about it, because the second example is worth more to this story than anything else we could go and find.

And one for anyone who works with data. The levy board surveys milk buyers every year to count producers. Adding one question about milking system would tell the country how far this has gone. Nobody has added it, and until somebody does, every published figure on robotic milking in Britain is either a nine year old estimate or a division sum.