Kemberg, Germany---Fresh from a massage, the cows turn slowly on a computerised "milking carousel" -- everything is ready at the Heideland farm south of Berlin to ramp up production once European milk quotas end on Wednesday.
"Look how well we treat them, all the space they've got, and here they even have a massage machine," says Richard Reiss, head of the giant farm of 1,200 dairy cows.
Dairy farmers like Reiss in Germany, Europe's biggest milk producer, are happy to see the back of the production limits that have prevented them from exploiting the export opportunities offered by the rising middle classes in Asia.
"As soon as we heard that Brussels was considering scrapping the quotas, we started thinking about how to respond," says the red-faced septuagenarian.
"Since 2012, we've done nothing but prepare for this," adds Reiss, saying that 8.0 million euros ($8.7 million) have been invested in the past two years to increase efficiency and the potential to ramp up output.
That includes the highly automated "milking carousel" that allows the cows to be milked three times per day instead of the normal two, and methane-capturing systems to generate energy for the farm.
The race for productivity includes pampering the cows a little -- passing along a spinning brush at the end of a metal arm a couple of times appears to make them happy.
And so are German farmers now that the production limits are history.
"We're happy the quotas are being scrapped. We're prepared," says Karl-Heinz Engel, president of the German dairy industry association, MIV, insisting that the sector is "export-orientated and competitive".
That is a fairly optimistic stance compared with, for example, farmers in France, Europe's second-biggest supplier, who invoke doom-and-gloom scenarios of oversupply and falling prices.
But in Germany, the industry views the scrapping of the quotas, introduced in 1984 to prevent over-production, as a "chance and an opportunity".
In fact, the regime has effectively been ignored in Germany anyway.
In 21 out of the 30 years that the quotas have been in existence, Germany has produced more than its annual allocation, preferring to pay two billion euros in penalties instead.
AFP
