Livestock Feeding Robot: From Pitchforks to ABB AMRs

Cows eat through the day, so feed has to stay within reach at the feed fence, and for most of farming history that meant forks and wagons. A livestock feeding robot now mixes the ration, drives it to the fence and pushes it back towards the animals. This post runs from pitchforks and silage to tractor-drawn mixer wagons and Lely's robots, then to the electric Nexus prototype RMH showed this autumn and the places where ABB's mobile robots and palletizers could fit. Milking and manure have their own posts on this site.

A Lely Juno pushes feed back within reach of the cows along a feed fence, 2009. Photo: Eppenga / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How cattle feeding went from forks to mixer wagons

Before machines, feed moved by hand. The pitchfork, a long-handled tool with two to five thin tines, pitched hay and straw, and forks with more closely spaced tines handled looser silage and manure. Silage spread during the 19th century. Green fodder had been preserved in parts of Germany since the start of that century, and in 1877 the French agriculturist Auguste Goffart published a book on keeping green crops in silos. In the late 1800s stalks were still cut by hand with a knife, carried on horse-drawn wagons and fed into a stationary machine called a silo filler, which chopped them and blew them into a tower silo.

Inside a dairy barn of the Florida Vegetable Company near Hastings, Florida, from a 1914 railway book on livestock farming. Photo: Florida East Coast Railway via Internet Archive / Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

The mixer wagon turned feeding into tractor work. It weighs, mixes and distributes a total mixed ration, in which forages, concentrates, protein supplements, minerals and vitamins are blended into a single feed. Trailed wagons range from 5 to more than 45 cubic metres. A 14 cubic metre wagon with a dry ration may carry 3 tonnes, enough for about 60 Holstein cows, and its weighing computer can store nine or more rations and 99 or more ingredients. Complete-ration systems can save labour and cut feeding costs, though the intensity of management may increase.

A paddle-type HiSpec mixer wagon coupled to a John Deere 6100 tractor, with maize silage behind, in France. Photo: Tractorboy60 / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A wagon still needs a driver, and feed has to be pushed back to the fence through the day so cows can reach it. Lely, the Dutch company founded in 1948 by the brothers Cornelis and Arij van der Lely in Maassluis, sells the Juno for that job. It follows programmed routes along the feed fence, pushes feed towards the cows and returns to its charging station. Lely's Vector system goes further. A feed grabber loads ingredients from a feed kitchen into a battery-powered robot, which mixes the ration, drives it to each animal group, distributes it and pushes feed on its rounds.

A Lely Vector feeding robot and its feed grabber on display at an outdoor show, 2022. Photo: Blonder1984 / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Feeding robots in barns in 2026

The newest entrant is still a prototype. On 4 October Future Farming reported that the Israeli machine maker RMH is developing Nexus, an electric feeding robot that drives itself to the silage clamp to fill its own 6 cubic metre mixing tub, so it needs no separate feed kitchen. It has two vertical augers, uses RTK GPS in the yard and other sensors inside the barn, and watches for obstacles with lidar. A swappable 48 kWh battery pack runs it for 2.5 to 3 hours of feeding. The prototype was shown at Innov'Space in Rennes, and the Dutch importer RMH Agri is aiming for a market launch in 2028.

A Trioliet Solomix 2 mixer wagon, a diet feeder with two vertical augers, delivering feed to cattle. Photo: Trioliet / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Lely's newer machines do more on their own. Juno Max is a feed pusher for large farms with several barns. It maps the farm, plans its own route, crosses yards with slopes of up to 20 percent and uses a stereo camera that measures how much feed is left at the fence. Lely Exos works in the field: it cuts fresh grass, fertilises as it goes, carries the load to the barn and feeds the cows, day and night. For the Vector, Lely quotes a loading accuracy of up to 98 percent and three magnets under the outlet that catch stray metal in the ration.

The Lely Vector mixing and feeding robot on outdoor display at the Lely Campus in Maassluis, 2023. Photo: Wvdp / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB does not make feeding robots, and we found no ABB machine working in a barn, so this part is about possibilities. A feeding robot is an autonomous mobile robot with a mixer on top, and ABB builds AMRs for factories. Its Flexley Mover P604 navigates with 3D Visual SLAM, builds its own maps, shares them with the rest of the fleet and positions itself to within 10 mm without extra infrastructure, while AMR Studio software sets up routes and tasks. At the other end of the feed chain, the IRB 660 is a four-axis robot with a 3.15 m reach and a 250 kg payload that ABB pitches for palletizing bags.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM, in a warehouse among stacked pallets. Photo: ABB

What feeding robots still have to solve

On farms, the robots are taking on more of the trip that a tractor and a person used to make. RMH wants Nexus to load itself from the clamp, Juno Max already drives from barn to barn, and Exos brings grass in from the field. Between the feed mill and the barn, ABB robots could take the bagged side of the work. ABB lists bags among the IRB 660's palletizing jobs, and its compact Flexley Mover P603 carries pallets, containers, racks and trolleys of up to 1,500 kg. Linking the two would still be a project that nobody has announced.

An ABB IRB 660 robot stacking bags of Lucchetti pasta on a pallet at Molinos in Argentina. Photo: Eduardo Gil / ABB

Cost and setup come first. Lely calls the switch from conventional feeding to the Vector a significant step that hands a repetitive daily task to a robot, and it offers advice on feed kitchen design and start-up support. Nexus is meant to skip the feed kitchen altogether. Safety matters because these machines share alleys with animals and people. Juno Max pauses and plans a new route when its stereo camera or laser scanner sees an obstacle, Nexus uses lidar for the same purpose, and ABB builds its P603 to the ISO 3691-4 and ANSI 56.5 safety standards.

ABB's compact Flexley Mover P603 AMR carrying a load of crates in a factory. Photo: ABB

The last piece is skills. With robots, the farmer's job moves from driving a mixer wagon to managing a ration in software. Lely's management system schedules Juno Max's pushing times, and an app shows when feed runs out at the fence. The ration itself still needs forage analysis and the same mixture day after day, and good management remains critical to a total mixed ration. Our posts on barn cleaning robots and dairy automation cover the rest of the barn and the dairy.

Heifers at the feed fence in a free stall barn at Brubaker Farms in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, 2011. Photo: USDA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com