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 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."
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/
Tux can milk anything with nipples really
bite my glorious golden ass.
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?
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
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!
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.
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.
"It will be a happy bull that wanders out."
Yes, but your milkshakes are going to have an awful funny taste.
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.
I think some of the point of this (apart from making Linux do something pretty cool :) was that by milking the cows when they are ready to be milked, they are happier and maybe (i don't think the article mentioned it) have a higher milk output. Remember that a cows milk is normally there to feed baby cows, which feed throughout the day, not once in the morning and once at night.
:)
This couldn't easily be done with a casual workforce - cows are normally on farms which tend to be some distance from population centers. Nobody will want to get woken up at 3 in the morning just because a cow suddenly feels like getting milked.
Also, more technology like this means more jobs for us nerds
Personally, I find the idea of an adult human drinking milk from another mammal pretty odd, but according to the size of the dairy industy, i'm in the minority.
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
"At what point does replacing a ten grand a year employee with a 100 grand machine become impractical? ...By simply creating technology to replace workers are we really improving things?"
You'd prefer a step above slave labor to this device?
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?
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.
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?
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...)
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
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.
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.
Finally posting something proving that Linux sucks!
Click here or here.
If you've checked your rural population and employment trends lately, you'd discover that in many of these places, you can't find a milk(maid/man/dude) to hire. Frankly, even amongst the underemployed, not many will work the hours a dairy farm runs at given what a farmer can afford to pay. In my parents area, northern Pennsylvania, there's actually an uptick of hispanic immigrants who come to work in the dairies, as it's otherwise almost impossible to find someone willing to get up at 4:00 a.m., milk cows, then repeat the process again at 4:00 p.m. Farmers with large enough herds to milk on the three-shift schedule have it even harder. The advantage of the machines are that they are reliable, consistent, and always on the job. If the cows are happier as a result, then that's a genuine added bonus.
(completely off topic, but I remember one cow we had that had injured herself, so that she had to be hosed off and have antibiotic spray applied a couple of times a day. After a couple of weeks of this routine, she became tame, and would sneak up behind you, put her head under your arm, and just about demand to be scratched behind the ears. So, I've seen the difference between a merely contented cow, and a genuinely happy one.)
Not to ruin anyone's agrarian fantasies, but my grandfather, who farmed all his life except for brief stints in the coal mines and on highway crew in the summer, said that he would have never gone into farming if it hadn't become mechanized. The work was bad enough that a summer spent shoveling (by hand) hot asphalt into holes in the highway for 8-10 hours a day was a vacation by comparison. He made sure that his kids got an education, kept their act together, and had a chance to get out.
Frankly, mechanisation of this type is what will allow small farmers (or at least smallish) to continue to exist. The problem with the OP's idea that those jobs should be left, so that people with lower IQ's have something to do, is that unmechanized farming will require far more than just their labor. Think carefully; do you want to go back to a system where fewer sysadmins are employed, but there are great opportunities in bovine lactate extraction? We did an informal poll at one of my previous jobs, and it turned out that at least 1/2 the sysadmins had some sort of agrarian upbringing. Maybe we were just all malcontents who didn't know how good we had it when we were cowherds, but somehow I doubt it.
Machines should Work, People should Think.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
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.