Slashdot Mirror
Tux Can Even Milk Cows!
GuitarNeophyte writes "If you're a cow, you want to get milked when you want to get milked. And if you were a dairy farmer, you want to make your cow happy. So what do you do? Set up a machine that gives the cow control of its milking schedule. Oh yeah, of course, it runs on Linux. It identifies the cow, then finds the udders, milks the cow, cleans it's undercarriage, and lets it go."
what else Tux can milk?
This is not the greatest
What happens when a bull accidently wanders in?
It identifies the cow, then finds the udders
A tool for finding udders? I really do not want to see where this story ends up...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I wonder if there's alearning curve for the cows. How long would it take a cow to figure out: "If I wanna get milked, I have to go through that gate" Do they have to teain them or something?
... who wouldn't like to be milked? (I hope I'm not logged in.)
Well the result of the bull walking in would either be a MOOOOOOOOOO!!!
...
...or a moOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Saw it yesterday on a link from linuxdevices (rad site, check it out).
Showed it to my friend who grew up on a cow farm, he was blown away, the video will get slashdotted but I recommend bookmarking and returning some time after to grab the high res video (~ 52 meg) as the accuracy of the teat suckion caps is pretty amazing, laser guided milky goodness.
Basically, cow gets duped into walking into a little pen with tasty food, the machine cleans it's teats, attaches cups with laser guided arm in an impressive display of dexterity, cow gets milked, computer monitors and gets all the stats, suckion caps come off, door on other side of pen opens, cow goes out.
Nothing alpha or beta about it, you could see it going into production straight away. I suspect if the cow started fucking around maybe the system would have trouble, but the back of the pen closes in a little after the cow goes in, so it can't run around. And it's pretty busy chomping on the food they give it to notice.
The biggest decider would be maintenance/support contracts and inital cost I suppose. (anyone track down the cost?)
Other than that, a good example of robotic automation.
And am a bit drunk, but I assume its running Ubuntmoo?
Hey Tux, milk THIS!
Microsoft has a software product which milks humans.
If you're going to use only 1% of a 40GB harddrive, why not just use a tiny bit of onboard memory and remove the entire harddrive from the equation?
schild
editor, f13.net
"What happens when a bull accidently wanders in?"
He'd have to fight Ms Mcdonald for the machine.
This is just slashdot trying to milk Linux's popularity.
I wonder how many anonymous COWards we'll have posting for this one.
Does the distro have cowsay preinstalled?
Lots of mootivated developers contributed to the project.
To code is human -- to milk bovine
I call bull -- this is udder nonsense!
Alternate headline: Tux gets creamed!
Does being a spelling/grammar-nazi fulfill you? If so, then you're truly a sad person that such a thing could make your life fulfilling. And if not, then you're truly a sad person for doing such a useless activity on such a regular basis for no money.
Actually, whilst at work, I happened to see this (not sure which channel) and was oddly intrigued by the machine. Apparently, the cows used to be milked twice a day, but when they milk themselves, it can be 6 times a day! The tech used was pretty complicated, as well. Lasers guide the "milkers" onto the nipples and it rarely misses it's target. Once connected, it auto-milks, and once done, it immediately unsucks the milkers and releases the cow. Repeat as necessary.
This machine also provides some solace for the bovines, because they can simply walk into the "robot," and they are alone and fed for the length of their milking. Simple.
My question after seeing the show: If the cows are milked more often, did the milk production increase? I assume it must by some level.
I never thought I would see an article on /. about Linux milking it's customers for everything they've got.
End of Line.
Hmph, anonymous COWard.
And in the old days we called them milk maids. Got to wonder how much of it is a true advancement and how much is simply replacing a minimum wage job with technology? At what point does replacing a ten grand a year employee with a 100 grand machine become impractical? Farm jobs actually don't fall under minimum wage laws or more to the point they have a seperate lower wage. 90% of the advances I'm quite sure are improvements but at some point I have to wonder if humans aren't more efficent than machines at certain jobs? A machine breaks down you repair it or buy another one. With minimum wage labor you hire another one. By simply creating technology to replace workers are we really improving things? You can call it survival of the fittest but that doesn't stop out of work people from breaking into your car or house to feed their families. The trick is balance and put the effort where it's really needed. Isn't food production a factory enough at this stage? We already have warehouses full of beakless tumor ridden chickens just to make sure there's a ready supply of cheap McNuggests. Personally I buy free range for a reason.
My mother's people came up the Oregon trail onto the then northwest territories, broke open the prarie sod, passed the first wintered in a hut made of mud and roots, then cultivated the prairies and built a town. Part of every summer I worked on one farm or another. I use to ride out to bring the cows in for milking from communal pasture.
Technology is great but I'm sad family farms are gone. The latest generation we have farming in the same area barely feel a breeze on their skin moving from the house to giant, air conditioned equipment and near sterile barns.
Ever been stupid enough to pick up a "cute" little barn kitten that's never known human touch?
yeh stop being soh fick. wot it matta. Same goes fer codeing nasties two!!!!
maine(voyd)[
printg("spolling iz fer looozerz");
retun 0;
]
Yet one more everday thing computers can be applied to! jesus, computers can solve problems outside of the relm of computers??? thats amazing, lets put it on slashdot!
"It will be a happy bull that wanders out."
Yes, but your milkshakes are going to have an awful funny taste.
Can it milk my Girl friend!
Why does yahoo do this
Cow Milks You!
"According to Hansson, early versions of VMS were based on an M68K CPU board, running OS9. "Later on we changed to an industrial standard PC-board," he says. "Along with that we also changed operating system. We went for Linux since some of us had worked with it and we believed that moving from OS9 to Linux would be rather easy."
Mac OS 9 requires a PPC processor to operate, 8.1 was the last M68K compatible version. With that in mind I think they are referring to OS/9.
NAME
cowmilk - milks a cow
SYNOPSIS
cowmilk [options]
OPTIONS
-m
Specifies that the cow is male.
This may be the only parameter, but do not underestimate its importance.
speliing/grammer-nazi
Heil Webster!
Wise adherents in the open source community have been using this piece of software for social networking. To my knowledge, it predates Friendster.
tux could prevent the dairy farmers from injecting the cows with massive amounts of BGH (bovine growth hormone) then we'd be sittin' in butter.
g ainst+distorting+or+falsifying+the+news+in+the+Uni ted+States
better yet, if fox news could stop sueing its reporters from bringing this story to the public's attention, that'd be even better. http://www.foxbghsuit.com/
it's rather funny, the judge said in effect that fox doesn't have to tell the truth. and we wonder why people like Bernard Goldberg keep harping on about "bias".
http://www.google.com/search?q=there+is+no+rule+a
follow the google link above for more info.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Apparently the cows actually like this because it is voluntary ("V") and they choose to get milked 6 times a day rather than just twice. I say if the cows didn't like it, they'd stay away as long as possible.
What would you rather do, hire milk maids to sit around waiting for the cows to come home?
And did you ever consider that maybe people would rather not spend all day milking cows? That maybe this frees humans to take up jobs which reward thinking, and maybe those downtrodden humans you despair for don't actually like dead end jobs that require no skill and no thinking?
You remind me so much of all the Marxists I have known who never worked a day in their lives, who came from rich families and felt guilty about it, who decided they had to atone for that by helping the downtrodden masses, whether or not those downtrodden masses wanted their help, indeed in spite of the fact that many of them were told countless times to piss off and mind their own business. I am not saying you are one of them, but the feeling is the same, that is what you remind me of.
Who the heck left you in charge of reviving Lenin and Stalin?
Personally I hope that boring repetitive jobs become less and less available, and relish the day when no one has to do any of them to earn a living. I rejoice in progress eliminating as many of those deadend jobs as possible, so more human brains are freed for thinking work, to increase the rate of progress. I rejoice in progress itself, even tho it gives luddites like yourself more freedom to retreat into socialist realism fantasies.
Infuriate left and right
I'll be passing it on to my co-worker who has a small dairy farm with her husband. They keep trying to go on vacation, but can't find anyone they really trust with the cows. Getting the cows to milk themselves would be pretty amazing. There seem to be some scheduling issues that would cause problems, though. The collection and storage system would have to be running all day instead of just during two times a day.
As far as the cow getting duped in with food, that's what happens in a standard dairy - each cow gets a grain ration while they're being milked. I can see there being some really nice benefits as far as animal comfort and production goes if they're on their own schedule instead of the farmer's.
~ Leilah
Come on, guys, there's no use in crying over spilt milk!
Cows HAVE to be milked. They produce so much milk that it has to be removed. I am not a farmer, I don't know what makes modern cows produce so much milk, breeding? feed? fake pregancies? but they do produce a lot of milk, I understand they don't cease production once full, and it gets quite painful if they are not milked twice a day.
Infuriate left and right
Why is it that a cow can figure out linux, yet many people can't?
Now Linux is so simple to use that even cows can use it!
Perhaps we should wait for the version with the bug fix, the one that identifies the cow, then finds the udders, cleans it's undercarriage, milks the cow, and lets it go. The cleaning is for the sake of the quality of the milk, not for the cow! Feel free to add a step that does a second pass after the milking, but it needs to be done before.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
"And did you ever consider that maybe people would rather not spend all day milking cows? That maybe this frees humans to take up jobs which reward thinking, and maybe those downtrodden humans you despair for don't actually like dead end jobs that require no skill and no thinking?"
As opposed to those skilled, thinking jobs that are being outsourced. Leaving Mr "Downtrodden and in debt" reverting to "going somewere fast, job #3" aka Fast Food.
At least you can't outsource a Milk Maid.
What? That's udder madness!!!
We need a special Linux distro that detects when Slashdotters post article synopses with spurious apostrophes in the word "its," then BLOWS THEIR FUCKING BRAINS OUT.
For real, I've seen this no less than twice a day for the last week. I don't know how it is that 80% of Slashdot are twats who bitch about "it's"/"its" transposition AND ANOTHER 80% of Slashdot are twits who make the mistake every time they type the damn word, but OMFG it needs to stop.
Yes, I DO feel better now.
along, nothing to see here.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
Can it milk my Girl friend!
No, but it could deflate her.
... uh no, forget about that.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
Posted by Zonk on Sun Oct 23, '05 10:12 AM
from the i-don't-have-it-that-good dept.
Thanks for sharing.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
TFA says the machine collects statistics on milk and production. Since you can't get disks much smaller than 40GB without spending more money for a microdrive or laptop drive, it sounds like they picked the best solution.
Infuriate left and right
... can the cows milk TUX? mm penguin milk
DeLaval offers both linux and windows based products. Their VMS system runs free of windows but they do have their ALPRO® Windows which is a data evaluation tool for Mircosoft Windows. It appears to work with the database that the Linux VMS system creates and updates to generate it's reports and assessment. But having a system totally controlled and monitored by Linux makes me feel a little warmer inside.
(I'm sorry...)
TechSutra
That's 400MB - they really should have used a compact flash card. Flash based memory has come a long way since the limit of 10,000 writes esp when used with load balancing filesystems. The read time of a CF card is slightly less that a IDE harddrive, but they make up for it with zero seek time.
I think the sad thing is the person that doesn't know basic english or can't be bothered using it.
Seeing retarded and lazy english really irritates me, so I enjoy returning the irritation.
probably also clean the under carage as well
whoops! i think you accidentally included the letter 'r' in the last word!
As opposed to those skilled, thinking jobs that are being outsourced.
Thank you. The right-wingers always have an answer as to why it's good to take away someone's job. But it all boils down to their blind worship of big business and a lack of empathy for those who find themselves unemployed or underemployed.
The parent to your post wrote:
"That maybe this frees humans to take up jobs which reward thinking, and maybe those downtrodden humans you despair for don't actually like dead end jobs that require no skill and no thinking?"
That ignores the fact that 25% of the population have IQ scores below 89. For someone with an IQ of 75, farm work may be very fulfilling. Take that away from them and they may be unable to find other work.
Not everyone has a high enough IQ to excel, or even function, in a job which requires intelligence, logic, and analytical skills. Not every person you meet on the street could be taught to do electronic design, software development, bio-medical research, or astrophysics. In order for our economy to thrive, we need jobs suitable for everyone in the work force -- including the mildly retarded who hold jobs as janitors, sanitation workers, laborers, assemblers, and President of the United States.
"If you're a cow, you want to get milked when you want to get milked. And if you were a dairy farmer, you want to make your cow happy. So what do you do? Set up a machine that gives the cow control of its milking schedule. Oh yeah, of course, it runs on Linux. It identifies the cow, then finds the udders, milks the cow, cleans it's undercarriage, and lets it go."
O CARRIER
Too...Many...Jokes...Can't...Compute...!&@#$%^$^N
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
I'm sure I heard a piece on this machine on the radio this week. It would probably have been the early-morning (6AM) "Farming today" proggy, essential tractor-cab listening all over the country ;).. .I've had a look at the prog's page at bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/farmingtoday/index.shtml but can't find it... anyone want to volunteer to hit "listen again" for all five progs this week? They're 30 mins long, I believe. lots of interesting stuff if you like that sort of thing...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
A 122-year-old dairy equipment company has used embedded Linux in a robotic cow-milking system (the system is robotic, not the cows).
Pity. This would be *so* much cooler with robotic cows!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
... for all the bush-haters out there. You read an article (or let's be realistic: just the headline) about an innovative machine for milking cows and immediately recognized this as an opportunity to bash Fox News.
You have two cows. You get Linux, and Linus Torvalds comes to your house and milks your cows once a day. The best part is: Linux is open-source, so you don't have to pay for the milking.
This sig is false.
thats the first time i ever had that bloddy thing explained to me so for once the Grammar nazi was useful!
XML - A clever joke would be here if
There's one of these just down the road from my place. A guest lecturer spoke about this to my class. The article didn't go into specifics about how the cow "decides" when to get milked (or at least I didn't see that in my hasty skimming of the article), but the one here works like so: The center of the paddock has the only water trough fenced off, with three gates to it. The cow can only enter through one specific gate. When it does, a scanner reads a tag on the cow's ear, and the computer checks if it's time for the specific cow to be milked again. If so, the exit gate that leads to the milking machine is opened. If not, then the exit gate that leads to the paddock is opened. One of the implications of this is that better quality milk is got from the cows. (This is in Waikato, NZ - if anyone was wondering).
So if I say that my software is "free" not as in "free beer", but, for example - as in "free milk", then is this OSI approved?
I remembered about this because of OS/9 trying to sue Apple over the use of OS9 in Mac OS9 - claiming that they were trying to trade on an established mark...
I seem to remember that it was thrown out because of the obvious (to anyone not trying to sue for money) progression from Mac OS 6 to 7 to 8 to etc...
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
It's true that you need to clean before milking. But maybe it is a good idea too, to clean the teats after milking. How healthy would it be for a cow to walk around with udders/teats with (dried-up) milk on them?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Can it perform cunnilingus while kneeling on a hardwood floor?
Guess not, but maybe the opposite 'number', so to speak?
(See the sig if you don't get the humor.)
The latest Slashdot meme.
Who are you returning the irritation to? The article was published on a news site, not slashdot. It's highly unlikely that the person who wrote the article even reads slashdot. All you're achieving is coming across as a total asshole (and I notice that you post anonymously).
Also if a cow is currently being treated with antibiotics (or some other drug) does the machine know this and throw the milk after milking it? Since milk laced with antibiotics is not fit for human consumption.. I presume in this case it can since it says the cow is identified it should be easy enough.
...a Beowulf herd of these!
you fight like a cow
You said the funny words!
..........FULL STOP.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Just a quick search told me that these kind of machines have been around for some time already (just as I thought it would).
http://www.cornesag.com/eng/milking/astro.html
(Note: you should disable CSS for this site, the 'text-decoration : blink;' is horrible..)
and what species is she?
You fight like a dairy farmer!
Ask me about repetitive DNA
It's nice this is based on Linux but it's a shame on the creators that they haven't heard of VMS before! Even worse, they didn't do their work while inventing the name for their system! (hint: Google).
The name is already "occupied" (since 1978) by a (quite famous) OS by DEC (Digital) -> Compaq -> HP.
...Mad Cow infection.
I, for one, welcome our new udder-grabbing overlords
It makes sense... I mean, cows and penguins dress to coordinate!
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
Commodity parts.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
...can you run Windows on it?
I wonder where a fella could get one of those laser-guided teat finders?
No, they are NOT. They are removed from their mothers and hand-fed "colustrum" ... the antibody-rich substance that precedes milk. http://www.farmllc.org/custom3.html Cows optimized for dairy use are not optimized for nursing a calf (look at a side view of a Hereford versus a Holstein).
It's a robot milker. The industry has had these for 10+ years now! Hell, I met several farmers who had these installed when I was working in the livestock genetics business 6-7 years ago. Yet suddenly it's a new thing because this robot runs Linux? Yeash.
If Slashdot wants to report about a new model of robot milker that runs Linux, then fine. But don't go making out like it's a revolutionary new concept.
BTW, slightly off-topic, but one of the biggest reasons why robot milkers took a long time to catch on has to do with the "preferred" genetic make-up. The industry had been breeding the cows with teets very close together because it made the cow look more streamlined. Then the robot milker comes along and requires that the teets have some space between so that the milker can properly locate them and attach. No idea if they've fixed this.
Also, robot milkers are apparently good for detecting problems with the cow. In anything but a very small herd, a farmer might not notice if a cow doesn't show up to be milked. But the robot milker keeps track and will flag any that don't show as needing to be checked for udder blockages.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Cows hate listening to low-quality mp3s while being milked.
Thanks for that. I knew most of that, but my original post was mistaken in screaming at Marxists. I meant those loonie lefties who embrace Marxism without knowing what it stands for, the ones who scream about the sanctity of the crappiest jobs, who are so eager to defend keeping the poor in crappy jobs as if that somehow washes their hands of guilt for being raised well-off. Since they are so quick to yap about Marxism, I made the mistake of using their own terminology. Sorry about that, all you true Marxists out there :-)
Infuriate left and right
I worked with a "Down Maine" dairyman for some years. We were pretty careful around the cows. There was a whole lot of concern about infection, mastitis, quantity put out by each cow, when we needed to fertilize them again (you don't get milk from a cow that hasn't had a calf and you have to get them pregnant every so often to keep production up) and so on. We did our best to keep the cows happy and keep production up.
We went through a lot of a sticky substance called "Bag Balm." We used it to decrease the amount of irritation cows felt when being milked by a milking machine that used air pressure. Either this device uses a different pressure or I'll bet a lot of their cows have to be taken out of the system periodically.
I really like how well the system monitors and logs in production for each cow. The movie file indicates that it keeps track of "each quarter." That is a kind of granularity that we could never achieve with our milking system, where we would weigh the total output of each cow and keep track of that. We also kept an eye on cream and butterfat content.
I do wonder what happens when (and if) more than one cow "wants" to be milked at the same time. Does a brawl ensue?
For those who don't know it, cows tend to be milked twice daily at 12-hour intervals in order to ensure the highest possible output. It's kind of difficult to switch them to daylight savings time and many dairymen just don't try. Cows who are not milked experience considerable pain if they are not and may develop mastitis. The same goes for all female mammals who are producing milk. If a cow's output can be increased by varying the times of milking just a bit, dairymen could pay for the device in a few years.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Finally posting something proving that Linux sucks!
Click here or here.
You all seem to worry about freedom of source code, but what about the freedom of the cows? Modern industrial farming keeps animals in barbaric conditions. Congratulations, you're great open source operation system now aids in the tourture of millions of animals.
The middle mind speaks!
So, when will we see a project to build a robot that can lead pets on a walk?
mark "We Also Walk Dogs"*
* cf. Heinlein
The videos are all in windows media 9 format. Errrr..
"Windows Media Player
You need Windows Media Player 9 to be able to watch these movies. If you do not have that version installed, please click on the link below:
Windows Media Player 9 - Download (Microsoft)
Operating system requirements
You need to have at least Windows 98 Second Edition to download Windows Media Player 9. If you have an older version of Windows 98, please visit the Windows Update page below before downloading Windows Media Player 9:
Windows 98: Download - Windows Update (Microsoft)"
So even Tux is getting more action now than most people on /.
Please drop the English translation. The latin line is obvious enough, and would be funnier by itself.
:)
Have a nice day
... when it can milk chickens. Then I'll be impressed.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
First there was DEC (Dairy Equipment Company), with a name exactly like the Digital Equipment Company.
Now, there's Voluntary Milking System (VMS), named after an operating system. It even runs its own copy of Linux.
http://www.gentoo.org/images/poster.jpg
"Only girl cows produce milk. They are kept, but the boy cows go off to the veal pens."
;)
Last I checked, there weren't any "boy cows" outside of San Francisco and Vegas shows...
Cow = Female
Bull = Male
Cattle = Many Bovine, Male or Female, any Age
I'd be afraid of the "Boy Cow" that can produce milk!
And here's another thinking point - every grocery store carries local small-farm dairy products where possible. If you don't want the local dairy to fail, buy their products (and not Kraft Foods...). The difference in the price of a gallon of milk is trivial between corporate and private farms.
Although I hate PETA (here's some fun - find a leftist and start unfavorably comparing PETA to GWB), I do believe that people need to start *PAYING ATTENTION* to what they buy. Complaining about corporate practices is the most idiotic thing that somebody can do. Don't like it? Don't give them your money. *TELL THEM* why you aren't giving them your money. Tell them that until they change, you, your family, your friends, and your neighbors won't give them any money, and then *FOLLOW THROUGH* on your promise. Corporations only care about getting your money, and if their current business model isn't cutting it, they will change.
Besides, all corp foods suck anyway. Their cheese lacks flavor, their milk is inferior (watery crap, ultra-pasteurized), their breads are nothing but water and air, and their meat is about as tasteless as you can get. Buying local will (usually) improve on all of these problems - your cheese will be made from the best whole milk fats aged and hand-washed, your milk will be slow-pasteurized which helps maintain the nutrition and density of the liquid, your bread will be crusty yet fluffy inside (and damn-tasty!), and your meat will have depth of flavor to go along with the tenderness of age.
Fuck PETA. Convince people to buy QUALITY and there won't be any corporate farms to worry about...until the corporate farms stop their current practices and start doing thing right.
Whiney little bitches...act responsibly, and spend your money accordingly.
I'm having difficulty creating the punchline here, but there are many out there.
Here goes setup one:
So this penguin walks into a barn and asks the cow, "...
And setup two:
Two farmers are sitting on the front stoop when one sees a penguin walking in the barn. He turns to the other farmer and asks, "...
I can't come up with the end of those jokes, but I know that they are leading somplace that is just good clean fun.
But I see everyone is resisting the joke that is on all of our minds, so I'm going to go ahead and do it...
In Soviet Russia, the cow milks the penguin!
I remember using OS9 with my TRS-80 Color Computer. It had a windows like GUI and used a mouse, all on a 8 bit processor.
but calves born on dairy farms are taken from their mothers when they are just 1 day old and fed milk replacers (including cattle blood) so that humans can have the milk instead.(1,2)
While the use of milk replacer is common practice, many farms (including our own) used "cull" milk that cannot be sold for human consumption and would otherwise be dumped. Usually this was milk from cows undergoing anti-biotic treatment.
Female cows are artificially inseminated shortly after their first birthdays.
Usually at 15 months, which is puberty for a cow - the same time a bull would have done it. It wouldn't work if the animal wasn't ready.
Cows have a lifespan of about 25 years and can produce milk for eight or nine years, but the stress caused by factory-farm conditions leads to disease, lameness, and reproductive problems that render cows worthless to the dairy industry by the time they are 4 or 5 years old, at which time they are sent to the slaughterhouse.
The reason cows are often "culled" or sent for slaughter at 4-5 years is that dairies use the cull as a tool to accelerate natural selection for milk production. If a cow is producing well, they are milked for many more years, and produce more offspring which are more likely to be high producer themselves. If they don't produce well after the second lactation, they are sold for beef. Contrary to a previous response, milk cows are used for beef - they are natually lean and well suited for low fat ground beef production.
Although these animals would naturally make only enough milk to meet the needs of their calves (around 16 pounds a day), genetic manipulation, antibiotics, and hormones are used to force each cow to produce more than 18,000 pounds of milk a year (an average of 50 pounds a day).(8,9) Cows are also fed unnatural, high-protein diets, which include dead chickens, pigs, and other animals, because their natural diet of grass would not provide the nutrients necessary for them to produce the massive amounts of milk required by the industry.
That has happened for 100 years. Selective breeding is hardly genetic manipulation. You simply use the breeding stock that produces offspring with the highest milk production.
As for feeding cows "dead-chickens", cows diets are primarily alfalfa (protein), corn silage, chopped grass and legumes (protein), corn grain (protein), and sometimes high fat supplements like cotton seed or bakery waste (cookie crumbs). Most farmers cannot afford to risk feeding animal by-products to dairy cows due to the potential for disease transmission.
Animal mistreatment is the exception, not the rule on diary farms. Most diary farmers take very good care of their cattle - it is a matter of profits. Unlike beef operations, they cannot affort to liberally use anti-biotics - most anti-biotics show up in the milk and every tank is tested - not just organic farms.
I want malk (Now with vitamin R!),
Make these suction cups look like tentacles and it would be a great hit in japan.
So this milking machine runs linux but you can't view the videos if your a linux user???
Someone needs to contact these butt munchers and ask them to have a chat with there webmaster.
If the vids were mpg, everyone could view without issues.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
I'm assuming GuitarNeophyte reads his own topics, and it was he or she that made the apostrophe crime (the error was not transcribed from the article). One might hope that the editors, who should have corrected it, read the replies too... yeah, I must be new here.
o/~ Oooooooooh... if you want it to be possessive, it's just I T S, but if you want it to be a contraction, it's I T apostrophe S... scallawag! o/~
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
(__) /\---/\
(oo)
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...."Have you mooed today?"...
http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwo rds/cows
milker$ mount -t cattle
mount: can't find
milker$
in the old days we called them milk maids.
That's because you were sexist, and probably got a hard-on making women do menial work wearing stupid outfits.
Got to wonder how much of it is a true advancement and how much is simply replacing a minimum wage job with technology?
It's both. They're equivalent.
At what point does replacing a ten grand a year employee with a 100 grand machine become impractical?
This has been answered already. Had you gotten past a 3rd grade education "in the old days" you would be able to do the simple arithmetic required. Had you reached college you might even be able to correct for interest and inflation.
Farm jobs actually don't fall under minimum wage laws or more to the point they have a seperate lower wage.
And this is a good thing?
I have to wonder if humans aren't more efficent than machines at certain jobs?
Haven't found one yet. And that certainly isn't the case here.
A machine breaks down you repair it or buy another one. With minimum wage labor you hire another one.
It costs less to build a machine than it does a person. Much less.
By simply creating technology to replace workers are we really improving things?
You keep repeating this as though you actually believe you're onto something. You're not.
You can call it survival of the fittest but that doesn't stop out of work people from breaking into your car or house to feed their families.
No one's calling it survival of the fittest. As for out of work people, you should probably make sure they get a share of the robotic milkings so they don't have to steal your car. (PS, this is the closest you came in your entire post to making a valid point. Bravo.)
Isn't food production a factory enough at this stage?
Not until there's a food factory in every backyard.
Personally I buy free range for a reason.
I have a feeling that reason is that you're out of touch with reality.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Yeah, but does it run - - OH SHIT!
I love this.
"Milk flow, quantity, and milking time are monitored individually for each of the cow's
four teats, and compared with historical values. Discrepancies are reported, and can be
early indicators of illness or injury, the company says."
... Now all they have to do is make the cows understand the information. Otherwise, they'd be pretty much like management.
Regarding the bull-problem, you could just write a simple script that would render 1-teated incompatible for milking.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
You should try reading the article next time. You'll be able to contribute more to the discussion that way.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.