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Tux Can Even Milk Cows!

Posted by Zonk on from the i-don't-have-it-that-good dept.

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."

4 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, they want to be milked by A+nonymous+Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Yes, they want to be milked by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 2, Interesting
      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?

      All of these... but there is one additional cause: continued milking causes more milk production. So, if cows would be milked less and less each halfday, they would eventually stop giving milk. So the concern would not be so much that cows wouldn't visit the machine, but that they would leave it slightly early (not completely draining them, causing slightly less milk production the next time, etc...).

      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.

  2. Re:automated accident prevention? by lintux · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, actually I heard a story about this happening with a slightly different model (from a different brand). Normally, nothing would happen, because the cows all have some thing around their neck (RFID? ;-)) to identify them, and the system should know it's a bull, so it can walk through immediately.

    However, at some farm they didn't have enough ID tags, so they had the bull borrow one from another cow. The bull felt hungry, so he went to eat in the robot. The robot thought it was a female cow and started to ... errr, well, tried to milk. To make the long story short, they pretty much had to buy a completely new robot, since the bull didn't quite appreciate it. ;-)

  3. Re:I saw this on TV by bhtooefr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    First off, I hate PETA, I eat meat, and I'm proud of it.

    I will say this: they're right about the whole overloading the cattle to death.

    It's not dropping from 8 tons to 5 tons. It's dropping from 8 tons to zero tons, because the cow dies.

    What a lot of farmers don't realize is that running a cow at 8 tons a year (number pulled out of my ass), it'll die in five years (again, another number pulled out of my ass, but it's fairly accurate, from what I've heard), yielding 40 tons for the whole lifetime.

    Milking 5 tons per year, with it living 10 years (not unrealistic), will give you 50 tons in the lifetime.

    Compare it to an extreme overclock - which is essentially what the Big Farms are doing to their cattle. That 2.4GHz CPU that you've got running at 3GHz might not do too well, and might quit working in five years - so, you want a cheap little web server? Sorry, your old rig is dead, and you'll have to get another one. But, at stock, it'll most likely still be around, slaving away as a little server.

    Of course, a lot of it's the breeding of the cattle - they're bred to overproduce like that. Going back to the CPU example, it'd be like a 2.4GHz-rated CPU running at 2.8GHz when it was installed - you'd just have to tweak it a little more to get it up to 3GHz.