Method of managing dairy animals in a free housing comprising a voluntary automatic milking system, and comprising determining TLM as the time since the last milking of an animal, determining AVMF as an average daily voluntary milking frequency for said animal, setting a desired milking interval DMI for said animal, marking said animal for manual collection if TLM and/or DMI fulfil a collecting criterion, making a list of marked animals, collecting and milking said marked animals, wherein said collecting criterion is fulfilled if TLM is above a first interval threshold, or if TLM is at least equal to the value of a mathematical function applied to said DMI, or if AVMF is below a frequency threshold, and TLM is above a second, shorter interval threshold MRI. Also a milking arrangement is disclosed with a milking robot having a control device arranged to perform the method.
