Every time one of the cows on Marten Dijkstras dairy farm in the north of the Netherlands needs to be milked, she makes her own way to the dairy barn and joins a queue to use a robot ic milking machine.

While the cows milk themselves, Dijkstra can avoid one of the most back-bending demands of being a dairy farmer. It gives me flexibility in my life as well as my back and shoulders, he joked.

It seems most of his fellow Dutch dairy farmers agree. The milking robot first invented by Dutch engineers in the early 1990s already outsells traditional milking parlors where cows are taken to be milked in the country.

And they are just one of a wave of machines now taking over mundane farming tasks in the Netherlands, including harvesting, and fruit and vegetable picking, with almost $1 billion spent on innovation last year by the sector.

This innovation drive, including increasing use of automation on farms like Dijkstras, has helped propel a country with a land mass smaller than the state of West Virginia to become the worlds second-biggest food exporter after the U.S. , with agri-food exports worth more than $100 billion.