Jason Nunes doesn’t let his plans to develop a robotic dairy during the next year or so stand in the way of babying his cows now.

Water technology that he worked with specialists to customize have improved animal health, for example.

“The main driver for me personally is the love of the cows,” said Nunes, a third-generation dairy farmer. “When they’re happy, I’m happy.”

Living in south-central Idaho, he and his cows are familiar with hard water. Calcium buildups in plumbing and water heaters notwithstanding, “a lot of nutrients are bound up by hard water,” he said.

Nunes enlisted Agrimaxx specialists to help him best use that company’s system. The overarching goal of the September 2023 installation at the dairy was “overall herd health — having the cows just do better,” he said.

The electronic device works with the ion structure of water to optimize water composition, according to Agri-maxx.com. The process breaks the surface tension of the water, acting as an electronic surfactant and water softener, allowing the water to move throughout the water system with less friction.

The system benefits his cows, Nunes said. Last winter, the dairy’s hospital population was at an all-time low, the breeding program in the 2023-24 cycle was “the best I’d ever seen it” and overall production numbers “all got better,” he said.

“One of the issues he had was very hard water,” said Matt Jantz, Agrimaxx outside sales specialist in southwest Idaho.

He was confident he could help and knew immediately that Nunes “really cares about his animals and wants them to be as healthy as they possibly can be.”

And Nunes, who expanded system usage last May to his forage crops, took directions well and wanted to learn.

“For example, it goes against convention to immediately cut your inputs,” Jantz said.

Using the system on crops, which included some irrigation-related changes, increased productivity per unit of field space and per cow, Nunes said.

Nunes Family Dairy has about 2,300 head including replacement heifers, dry cows and 1,000 milking cows.

The farm is 660 acres.

The family also has a calf ranch, where one of the water systems was put in last August.

As for robotic dairies, Nunes, on visits in various locations, saw “extremely happy cows,” he said. “They had a good life, they worked hard and their dairy production was good.”

Automated milking on a cow’s individual schedule is at the center of the approach.

Nunes favors individual milkers into which a collared, pasture-roaming cow enters on her own volition. Eight milkers would be needed on the 500-cow robotic dairy he envisions running separately from the existing dairy.

“For me, it’s giving the cows the freedom to spread out,” he said.

Lower production costs, better milk output “and just a better overall environment for the cows” are among benefits Nunes targets with the robotic dairy, where “I would like to be milking in the fall of 2026.”

“The main reason I’m doing any of it is because I love cows,” he said.