David Brahms

This is a semi autobiographical, semi narrational, semi contributory profile which I have set up separately to current work, due to personal interest, previous work experience, and [in a previous life, in another country...] deep involvement in the dairy and facility design arena. This included working with architects, engineers [some civil, some not so civil...], construction managers, and tradesmen of all types. I restarted following current industry practices, technical developments, facility design, and implementation, seeing in practice the industrialised and automated developments I foresaw, designed, prepared infrastructure for, and implemented in the early to late 1980's [time flies!], whether it was robotic milking, automated micro climate control within housing; extensive milking parlour automation, flexible PLC controlled switchboards with sensory inputs; calf raising, cow comfort, behavioural traffic patterns and metrics related to external stimuli, artificial and natural; lighting controlled behaviour [and behaviour controlled lighting!], water treatment, consumption and metering, automated manure handling [preferably flushed], solids recycling, and biogas generation; computerised individual cow management. and telemetric reporting. As someone whom had worked in our dairy from age 14, and had become a fairly good general tradesman/designer, I saw, maintained, designed, built, and helped transform it from largely manual to extensively mechanised; then into automation, industrialisation, and computerisation [including implementing some quite large scale world firsts]; and treating a herd, infrastructure, and workers like the sophisticated, integrated "organism" it is. This included seeing a dairy as a intensely managed, hygienic food production facility, not a sloppy, "agricultural", subsistence level "It'll be OK", "We've always done it this way" semi hobby. It was an incredibly exciting, horizon widening period, especially seeing the results of "instinctual", experiential, and experimental investments proven successful and profitable, long before the Internet, when research comprised of many hours of observation, day and night; collecting and reading journals from all over; thinking and planning; painfully and slowly typing letters, then waiting 6-8-10 weeks for a letter, brochure, or research paper to return... A joy to see what was once borderline science fiction and the ravings of a wild eyed but fascinated, dedicated, and completely immersed "Young Turk" being accepted, commonplace, industrialised, and mass produced!