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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."
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.
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.
Cows actually like to get milked. They don't want to walk around with their udder full. They were doing research with the first generation of robotic milkers when I was doing my Masters at Guelph in the early 90s. Robotic milking is a big win-win. I wish we had these things when I was growing up on the farm. They liberate the farmer from the milking process (at least twice a day), and they provide a much more natural experience for the cow. In the wild, lactating animals don't just feed their young twice a day. The research from the early 90s showed these machines being used on average 6 times a day by each cow, which coincidentally is about the same frequency a cow will nurse her calf. Clearing the udder of milk more frequently typcally increases a cow's milk production by about 10%, a win for the farmer. Less milk in the udder also means a drop in bacterial infections in the udder. Again a win for the farmer (and the cow) who doesn't have to go through the expense and time of treating mastitis.
For small farms, this could be a very practical idea. If the farmer spends most of his time milking then he doesn't have time to do other stuff like fix broken equipment. If you have to pay someone to fix a broken tractor rather than doing it yourself, you're going to pay something more in the $50-$100/hr range. At these rates, burning $100K doesn't take long.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run 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.
Now, this only works in the theoretical world of Free Market. In the good old farm-subsidy, price-control, minimum-price-cap US of A, this will lead to the excess milk product being made into more government cheese.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Coincidentally my parents have exactly this milking system on their farm now, for about half a year. It's really cool to see the thing boot up, see the LILO menu appear and Red Hat Linux booting up.
:-)
Anyway, the cows don't get too much training. One day they're milked the "traditional" way, the next day there's the robot. It takes some time before they get used to that. After about a week already (especially) the younger cows get used to it already. They come 2/3 times a day by themselves, no problem. The problem is mainly with the older cows, they somehow just don't feel like going by themselves. Even now, half a year after we started milking with this robot, we still walk through the barn a couple of times a day to find those cows and make sure they go to the robot.
And even then, they sometimes try to escape from the waiting room to go back to their resting place. Sometimes cows are really naughty.
So I think it doesn't take a long time to make the connection between "that new place" and the actual milking. It just takes an eternity for some cows to actually want to go there.
Actually, one of the main points of the Communist Manifesto was that industrialization would eventually lead to a situation where machines would essentially do all the work, and the collective society would be made equal, since noone would really want anything (though those who had the knowledge would be required to periodically service the machines).
Your criticism isn't really directed towards Marxists, so much as toward "short-sighted bleeding-heart leftists".
Of course, a better leftist argument would be "When we replace people's jobs with machines, wouldn't it be great if we used the cost savings to pay those people to do something other than work. Not that we're saying we should pay them to sit on their asses (though, if we did, it would be the same for society as if we paid them to do the useless job better suited to a machine), but rather, we should pay them to learn, so that they may either rejoin the workforce in a more useful capacity, or simply contribute to society as 'learned individuals', sharing knowledge with their peers."
Actually, one of their Dutch engineers told me that one of the next models will indeed have Flash. Right now they do at least use laptop disks IIRC, so slightly more shock-resistent.
;-)) and a special application for this robot. That's where all the data is collected. The robot itself doesn't really save anything.
However, although you're right about the data collection, this doesn't happen on the robot. Unfortunately, the machine is directly connected by plain Ethernet to a Win2K machine with MSSQL (I guess they left out this part on LinuxDevices
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).
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..)
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).
A farmer's NIGHTMARE is to have an undetected case of mastitis contaminate a whole milking - the collection trucks have their own testing. Each milk collection (per cow) is in a separate tank until the automatic testing for blood and abnormal numbers of white cells is done. These scanners can pick up the signs of IMPENDING mastitis before the milk quality is affected, and way before humans spot it - wastes less milk and cows seldom develop full-blown mastitis. If the milk doesn't meet standards, it's sent to the waste tank.
Detecting damage to udders and teats? Compare images of the cow's previous state, and signaling the farmer there is something that needs a human to look at.
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.
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.