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Clemens Renner is working at GEA Farm Technologies in Bönen, creating software for electronic control units and farm management terminals. In his first two years with the dairy equipment company, he didn’t mind getting his hands dirty because that was his plan.

Before I started working as a software engineer at GEA Farm Technologies, I had been working on a PhD thesis. The thesis was supposed to deal with advanced theory and with software programs that would not make their way into practice for another few decades. To some degree, it was fun experimenting with these things but on the other hand, I felt that I needed to do something more practical. I wanted to create software that would solve real-world problems for real-world people – in short: I wanted to get my hands dirty. When there was the opportunity to start working for GEA Farm Technologies, this was as close to dirty hands as I wanted and I joined the Electronic Software Equipment team.

Soon after that, I found myself working with the milking robot (MIone) development team and by that time, I really got my hands dirty. We had an ambitious schedule to present the automatic milking robot at the EuroTier trade show in 2008 and whatever progress we made at our desks, we had to test on the farm. I learned surprising things in these weeks, e.g. that cows can only be milked if they calved; cows like automatic brushes (they really do); and cows don’t mind temperatures below zero degrees Celsius (while I did).

The most lasting impression however was that even if I only spent an hour on the farm, I had to wash my clothes when I got home. When you are dealing with cows, you must accept the fact that they are not the cleanliest animals on our planet. This observation is supported by the fact that an entire branch of our industry is concerned with manure handling (which is a nice word for something that smells that bad). Astonishingly though, while these impressive creatures weigh more than 600 kilograms, they still manage to walk gracefully, and they are actually rather cute when they find something new. It is the expression of an inner fight between curiosity and fear when they don’t know whether they found something dangerous or delicious. Needless to say, curiosity almost always wins and once they have smelled and tasted it, they usually accept it – even if it’s stainless steel.

Working on the robot, every step we took on the way to a working system was accompanied by excitement and joy about what we accomplished in such a short time, even though it has given me a few gray hairs.

It is always thrilling to see one of our installations in operation with live animals and it is a great feeling to know that people are actually using our systems to earn their money. And just because I think that the latest piece of software is working well, it doesn’t mean the cows think so, too. More than once I thought I had the perfect solution and when I presented it to the cows they told me in their unmistakable way that I should start again and try harder this time. They virtually shook their heads as if to say: That’s not good enough.

I have been with GEA Farm Technologies for a little more than two years now. There probably are easier jobs than making cows happy but there are only a few jobs as rewarding as mine. The moment when the cows accept the system that our team built is the moment we know that we did it right.