Buses filled with excited harborites rolled out from the Grays Harbor County Fairgrounds at about 8 a.m. Friday for the 18th annual Showcase Grays Harbor.

The morning saw all buses head to Oakville for a tour of Austin Dairy and Wild Thyme Farm.

Austin Dairy is one of Grays Harbor County’s most unique businesses because it’s not your typical dairy farm — at least in the traditional sense. Technology is rearing its robotic head in businesses throughout the country, and Austin Dairy is proving that Grays Harbor County can adapt to these changes in business and can excel while doing so.

“These are probably some of the calmest cows you’ll ever see,” said Ron Austin, son of owners Jim and Janie Austin.

Austin Dairy incorporates machinery to help with the milking of their some 100 cows. While robots do most of the milking, Ron noted that utilizing technology is not without its drawbacks and that there is manual milking done at Austin Dairy. Occasionally the machines are unable to hook onto a cow because of the layout of a particular cow’s udder.

“The technology is nice, but there can be drawbacks,” Ron said. “It’s been four years, so every little thing that can go wrong basically has.”

The robots are in operation 24 hours a day, even after hours when no employees are at the farm.

“As long as I don’t get a call, they’re (the cows) going through,” Ron said. “It’s basically people-free. As long as the computers are working, they’re working.”

But how do the cows know what to do and where to go without direction from employees?

It’s taken care of by Austin Dairy’s sort gates, a vital component of the automated dairy farm.

“Each cow has its own frequency (tag) and they can’t get into the parlor without coming through the gates,” explained longtime employee and herdsman Allen Mittge.

If a particular cow is due to be milked then the gates open and allow the animal to enter the parlor, where the robots do their milking.

“We’re limited to seven cows in the parlor,” Mittge said. “If they’re not permitted to be milked, then they go to the feed or to the pasture.”

Before stopping for lunch at Satsop Business Park in Elma, those who first went to Austin Dairy were transported to another Grays Harbor gem in Oakville, Wild Thyme Farm.

John Henrikson and his brothers made their way from the East Coast to Grays Harbor County and decided to purchase the Wild Thyme property in 1987.

“It was kind of overgrown, but there was charm to it,” Henrikson said. “After about three minutes, we said we’d buy it.”

The farm started out as a potato farm and then became a dairy farm in the early 1900s. Henrikson noted the layout of the property is such that operating a successful dairy farm would be difficult.

“It’s a terrible place to have a dairy farm,” he said. “There’s lots of elevation and it gets muddy.”

Wild Thyme is now divided into four sections, the first of which is the arboretum. Trees that grow near the area — but that are not technically native — make up the arboretum. The next section at Wild Thyme Farm is for agroforestry. According to the farm’s website, agroforestry is the science of creating forestry plantations that function much like an agricultural system. Henrikson said this can be witnessed by observing the relationship between birds and berries at the farm.

“I can tell if the birds are having a rough time based on how fast the berries go,” he said.

The last components of the farm are the native forest and the wildlife forest. Henrikson and Wild Thyme Farm have been recently battling beavers within the wildlife forest. Rather than trap the beavers, Henrikson opted instead to overplant trees the beavers like.

“They cut the trees they like, but the tree just grows back,” Henrikson said. “They seem to have a symbiotic relationship.”

After lunch the tour went to Vertellus Performance Chemicals in Elma and Vaughan Company in Montesano before returning to the fairgrounds.