What a documentary The mystery of the milking robots by Vuk Janic. Tuesday evening (again) on television. A repeat yes, I can’t help it. But it was nice to see him again. The film dates back to the time when we did not mention farmers in the same breath as emissions, nitrogen and buyout. It is 2015, and Johan van Rijthoven from Casteren is sitting on the roof of his cow shed and paints his anger in large letters with white paint. His complaint is directed against the manufacturer of milking robots and the company that maintained the robot for him.
His cows no longer want to enter the robot. You should imagine that robot as a kind of bus stop house with a turnstile in front of it. The idea is that cows themselves walk into that thing to be milked, the machine accurately records how much milk flows from each teat of the udder. Only it kept coming fewer milk from the cows. Twenty percent less than when Van Rijthoven still milked the animals himself.
And what was it about? The farmer thinks that the animals associated the robot with the discomfort of not having been milked properly – it caused them inflammation. The farmer’s lawyer blames leakage or stray current in the machine, stressing the cow. “Cows are very sensitive to voltage differences.” The manufacturer and the maintenance company blame the farmer, his feed, or his cows. And then there is Stef Freriks. What should I call him? Therapist, medium, magician? He feels things. The tension of Johan van Rijthoven, the stress of his cows, the energetic fields under his farm that are burdened by a nearby war memorial and burial mounds.
‘Bye’
Beautiful, the contrast between the earthiness of the farm and the wandering energies. The emotions around the bare numbers. Due to the hassle with the milking robot, Van Rijthoven’s company is almost ruined, and so is he. A large part of the documentary is devoted to the legal process. The milking robot must eventually be bought back by the manufacturer, but that does not undo the damage suffered. Van Rijthoven has to sell his land (40 hectares) to pay off his debt to the bank and continues to litigate. Meanwhile, Janic continues filming on the farm where Maria van Rijthoven, the farmer’s wife, unemphatically takes charge. She starts a daycare on the farm to ease the burden. The circles under her brown eyes get deeper and deeper, but she stays upright. The camera always catches its eye on Johan, who is sitting at the kitchen table with fellow farmers, listening to Stef Freriks, who says that they should manage and control their farm ‘from their feelings’. She thinks hers. The documentary ends with a verdict: insufficient connection has been demonstrated between the milking robot and the damage suffered by Van Rijthoven. He gets no compensation, nothing.
Can’t do it, such an ending. The only thing I could find was that Van Rijthoven still appealed in 2020, together with fellow farmers who saw this documentary and joined him. But how did that end? Then I just called him. He was just having his coffee, in the background I could hear children playing. The appeal has been rejected, he says, and he has not yet been able to repurchase his land (seven generations in the family). But otherwise it runs “super”. Two hundred cows, more than before, and they give so much milk that they have to be milked three times a day. “I have a Polish employee who takes over twice a day.” The milking robot, he says, was an idea of his sons at the time, how old were they, 15, 16, 18? “They wanted to move forward.” Now his eldest son Chris is with him in the company, and no, he doesn’t see him wanting to use the robot again anytime soon. “That was it?” he asks. That was it. “Bye!”