[Automatic milking systems--quality assurance of milk for drinking]

German consumers trust the safety and the quality of milk and milk products. Compared with other animal products, e. g. meat and meat products, their confidence is justified in so far as milk and milk products cause only few foodborne diseases in Germany, although 80 percent of all German cows develop at least one case of mastitis per lactation. Due to financial reasons, more and more German dairy farmers are forced to initiate a time-saving rationalization of their workflow. Therefore, automatic milking systems (AMS) are used increasingly, even though the costs of purchase result in a slow pick-up in sales. Moreover, AMS do not comply with legal requirements. Thus, an additional regular, the so called "catalogue of measures", had to be enacted to ensure the hygienic harmlessness of milk produced by AMS. This is the first time, that udder health at individual cow level was related to milk quality beyond merely clinical signs. Together with technical innovations for an improved health monitoring at cow and herd level as well as the implementation of quality assurance programs based on prevention, this improvement offers good prospects to produce not only a hygienically harmless, but also a physiologically composed milk and therefore a qualitatively high-grade milk from healthy cows. Being the vehicle of the most recent improvements in technology, AMS do have the potential to make a crucial contribution to this development.