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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."
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."
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.
What happens when a bull accidently wanders in?
It will be a happy bull that wanders out.
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!
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.
"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.
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.
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.
... 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. ;-)
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
My experience is with my relatives and a few people my parents have as friends, but:
"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)"
None I know do this, though I am sure you can find people that do anything. Cows are VERY expensive and the above is not a real good plan. The little bit of cows milk lost is MUCH more than made up in living, breathing, healthy, cows producing milk. Common sense would tell you that.
"Female cows are artificially inseminated shortly after their first birthdays.(3) After giving birth, they lactate for 10 months, then they are re-inseminated, and the cycle starts again. Some spend their entire lives standing on concrete floors; others are crammed into massive mud lots. 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.(4,5)"
Again - I know of maybe 15 fairly large dairy farms - none whatsoever does this. I'm sure there are some that do, I suspect you can even find some that do even worse (you can still find meat processing facilities that beat the cows to death), but that is an exception not the rule. Dairy cattle last until they quit producing milk, then they go for dog food and other low grade products (dairy cattle generally taste bad and are tough). They are generally farly old - if you want to get up in a bunch about cattle being killed young go to the beef industry. Hell, the guy who used to work for my parents (land surveyors) kept two or three cattle, never bred them, and milked them daily. They have been bred to do this and if they are not milked they devolop infections.
"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)."
Cows were bred to do this long ago - you can purchase organic milk that is made in nearly those quantities that do not use them. Though I do not like the use of the hormones and chemicals (I ingest them also), a little bit of education instead of propaganda would be useful.
"(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.(10)"
Not any longer, illegal in most industrialised countries since tha mad cow disease was discovered in the early to mid 90's. Hopefully PETA is a little more up to date than that...
"Clearly if the cows natural breeding life is cut from 8-9 years to half that, then the cow is undergoing some very extraordinary stress and adverse conditions. "
Clearly so, if it were true. However, should you simply go tour a local diary farm (many will allow it, in fact encourage it) you will see that most of what you quoted is totally incorrect for the vast majority of dairy farms. It's like accusing the entire computer industry of stuff because SGI did some crappy stuff 15 years ago.
And, lastly, one of the points I was thinking is that the system being hawked in the post *precludes* nearly all of this type of treatment. Thus, how do they cope with it - apparently put on blinders and keep on keeping on is the answer.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
whoops! i think you accidentally included the letter 'r' in the last word!
The rest of the drive is full of the cow's favourite MP3 files.
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).