Cows On Treadmills Produce Clean Power For Farms

separsons writes "William Taylor, a farmer in Northern Ireland, recently developed the Livestock Power Mill, a treadmill for cows. Taylor uses the device to generate clean, renewable power for his farm. Cows are locked into a pen on top of a non-powered, inclined belt. The cows' walking turns the belt, which spins a gearbox to drive a generator. One cow can produce about two kilowatts of electricity, enough energy to power four milking machines. It may seem like a kooky idea, but Taylor could be onto something: According to his calculations, if the world's 1.3 billion cattle used treadmills for eight hours a day, they could provide six percent of the world's power!"

Comments

Food?

[bluefoxlucid]

Do they need to eat more?

Re:Food?

[Brett Buck]

They would probably be walking around anyway.

Re:Food?

[rotide]

Apparently you've never watched cows grazing out in an open field. They do move around, but only enough to get fresh grass between their lips. They don't trot from one end of the field to the other. They mow a bit, take a step, mow a bit, take a step. Sure, they do end up going a fair distance over time, but nothing like being forced to walk a treadmill.

Re:Food?

[ElizabethGreene]

Just to make sure I understand... We grow grain with petroleum based fertilizers, harvest it with diesel powered combines, diesel truck it over asphalt highways, and then feed it to cows on treadmills to make electricity. Then we diesel truck the manure off and bury it in a landfill.

Yes, that make perfect sense.

Here is a crazier idea! Let the cows WALK to gather GRASS instead. Then use the corn for ethanol! Why we insist on feeding 75% of our grain production to ruminants baffles me.

-ellie

Re:Food?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Then we diesel truck the manure off and bury it in a landfill.

Y'all ain't from around here, are ya?

Re:Food?

[mcmonkey]

Hint to mods: parent complaint is 'Funny' not 'Insightful'

This is crazy: "We grow grain with petroleum based fertilizers, harvest it with diesel powered combines, diesel truck it over asphalt highways, and then feed it to cows on treadmills to make electricity."

But is this any more sane: "We grow corn with petroleum based fertilizers, harvest it with diesel powered combines, diesel truck it over asphalt highways, and then feed it to yeast on treadmills to make ethanol to burn."

Re:Food?

[Migraineman]

Did some measurements in prep for a human-powered race. I agree - a very in-shape athlete can sustain 200W on a recumbent bike for a couple of hours. The average Joe cannot - he can sustain about 70W continuous, occasionally bursting to 250W.

A cow that could sustain 2kW would be a frightening beast.

Re:Food?

[Rastl]

No shit. I've never seen a person with an actual handicap or disability using those scooters. Every one of them had two arms and two legs and none of them were paraplegics or quadraplegics.

Oh, so my mother who was in end stage cancer and unable to walk more than a dozen yards doesn't qualify? She had two arms and two legs.

I agree that a fair number of the people using them might look like they would benefit from exercise but that doesn't mean that I have any right to judge whether or not they use a scooter. Ditto with the handicap cards. I'm not qualified to decide if they're handicapped or not so I don't bother worrying about it.

Re:Food?

[Fnkmaster]

There's this *really* cool thing called a free market economy that prevents bozos from implementing cockamamie schemes that don't create any economic value. Then we go and do stupid shit like subsidizing corn production to fuck up these economics. I'm not an absolutist, but when it comes to energy production technologies, we really should just let the market sort it out, and abolish the corn subsidies.

Things that make no sense in terms of net energy production will inherently be money-losing ventures in the absence of state intervention. So we won't have to listen to people whining about how bioethanol is inherently a net energy-wasting fuel (gee, if it is, and it produces no economic value otherwise, it will be a money losing venture and nobody will make it).

Beyond that research funding and venture capital investment should finance the technologies that are actually capable of producing net energy, rather than those that have figured out how to game the system of subsidies best.

What?

[sbierwagen]

Don't the cows have to... eat? How is this any more efficient than burning corn directly?

Re:What?

[quenda]

Corn? Cows eat grass. Feeding them corn would be a huge waste of resources.

1.3 billion treadmills needed

[FTWinston]

And how long would it take a cow walking on a treadmill to produce an amount of energy equivalent to that used to produce the treadmill (including its raw materials) anyway?
But if he's got 1.3 billion cow treadmills handy, I'd happily take one if I had a cow.

Really clean power?

[wvmarle]

Funny and innovative as the idea is: I wonder how clean this energy really is. It doesn't come out of thin air, those cows have to eat. And a cow's digestive system tends to produce quite some methane (a major greenhouse gas), and quite some waste - which also releases lots of ammonia amongst other harmful chemicals. On top of that the fodder also has to be produced (often using power for machinery and so), and a cow that walks that much definitely eats a lot more than a cow that grazes the pasture or is kept in a stable without much room to move.

And besides I think there are much more cattle-friendly ways to exercise your cow.