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?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Apparently you've never watched cows grazing out in an open field.

I saw one open a box of oreos and eat it right in the aisle at Safeway. She was sitting on a scooter, so that probably changes the whole exercise dynamic, though.

Re:Food?

[bradm]

TFA says that cows walk around 8 hours a day grazing anyway.

Let's get to the more important questions: What impact does all that captive exercise have on the tasty dairy and beef products so critical to maintaining our waistlines and thickening our arteries?

If it makes the beef even better and generates power, it's a total win.

(With unheartfelt apologies to the veg types in the crowd).

Re:Food?

[nedlohs]

The cows around your parts must be completely different than the lazy fucks around here.

Sure they take a step now and then when their mouth can't reach anything edible anymore, but I wouldn't really call it "walking".

Just ask an Intelligent Designer, they'll explain that cows are so lazy they only bothered walking part way up the hill when the flood came and hence were fossilized in the middle instead of at the top, like the less lazy people.

Re:Food?

[Surt]

Unfortunately, increasing exercise will reduce the tastiness of both milk and meat. The meat gets leaner (the fat is the part that gives is great taste, and is why kobe is legally required to have a minimum fat content). The milk tends to have more stress byproducts, but that impact is less important.

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?

[Red Flayer]

Unfortunately, increasing exercise will reduce the tastiness of both milk and meat. The meat gets leaner (the fat is the part that gives is great taste, and is why kobe is legally required to have a minimum fat content). The milk tends to have more stress byproducts, but that impact is less important.

Do you have any citation for the difference in milk between exercised and non-exercised cows?

I'm curious, as I'm not sure what "stress byproducts" are... but it's known that among humans, exercise during lactation does not change the makeup of breast milk, except when exercise is extremely vigorous (unlike these treadmills), and even then the impact is temporary (lasting less than 1 hour). Furthermore, there is no different in fat content, protein content, etc.

I'm not saying that cows are biologically the same as humans... I just question that exercise would affect milk production differently among different mammals when I couldn't find any evidence to support that conclusion.

Re:Food?

[TheRaven64]

Apparently you've never watched cows grazing out in an open field

I grew up near a dairy farm and watched the cows quite often. They'd run across the field, go in groups and investigate anything that made a noise or entered the field. They stood still when they were eating, but walked around quite a lot at other times.

Maybe you just have lazy cows near you?

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?

[cayenne8]

"You forgot the methane and C02 produced by the cows."

A small price to pay for yummy milk, cheeses, steaks and roasts...

Re:Food?

[Surt]

No, it's anecdotal based on a dairy owning friend who likes to complain about the activists who want the cows to be free range, and the number of complaints about milk quality he gets when he does. He can't win.

Re:Food?

[MiniMike]

Could the scooter fit on a treadmill?

Re:Food?

[Z34107]

Cows are lazy, but also very curious.

I was bicycling past a herd of cattle, and they all looked up and stared at me. They started wandering towards the road I was at, following me, but soon broke from "mosey" into full-out "walk." I sped up, and so did the cows - they were leaping, like giant, bloated, mooing rabbits, fully keeping pace with my bicycle.

Granted, I never had cancer, but I'd like to think I bicycle faster than cows. They were almost doing 20 miles an hour.

They're evil, too. My grandfather was a farmer back in the day. One day working in the fields, a door-to-door salesman drove up, through the field, to try to hawk something to him. My grandfather was annoyed, naturally, but the cows discovered his car and licked all the chrome off.

Re:Food?

[crmarvin42]

How many generations are you separated from the farm Ellie??

Don't bother answering that, it's retorical. Animal production farms are always associated with crop production farms where the manure is spread on fields as fertilizer. Landfills are full of trash, not animal waste (unless you count cat and dog feces).

We don't feed 75% of our grain production to ruminants. We don't even feed 75% of our grain production to livestock (which includes pigs and poultry). According to the USDA, nearly a third (~ 4.25 billion bushels) of domestic corn production is expected to be used for ethanol in 2009/10. In the same season, ~5 billion bushels (~45%) will be used for "Feed and residual uses" which includes both human consumption and livestock use, and another ~2 billion bushels will be exported.

As to the original topic, putting cows on treadmills, I don't see it being feasible. Cows are rough on equipment, so the treadmills would need to be very robust. Cow manure is very corrosive, so they'd either have to use expensive equipment that is durable, or have a high rate of failure of various parts. I do have to admit though, that cows do a fair amount of walking in free stall barns, but I just don't see how you'd get them to use the treadmills instead of walking up and down the isles as they do now. IMO, it's a case of something being technically plausible, but ultimately unfeasible.

Definitely an intriguing idea though. I'd be interested to see if they could do something similar with an animal that is raised in a more confined environment, like a gestating sow. It would require that she get more food, but her appetite already oustrips what she's allowed to eat so that's not an issue (whereas dairy farmers don't want their cows to be wasting any of the energy that could be going into milk production, and the cows are already offered ad libitum feed). It would come down to whether the electricity a sow could generate would save the farmer more money over the increased feed, equipment, and management costs.

Re:Food?

[crmarvin42]

Correction # 1:
Cattle are not as sedentary as you may believe. Range raised beef cattle walk between 2.8 and 4 kilometers/day according to a 1991 study published the Journal of Animal Science. This means they are already doing a lot of walking. The real question is whether we can capture that energy they are already spending, and turn it into electricity at a price that is acceptable. (I doubt that they can, but I could be wrong)

Correction # 2:
Exercise does not increase "stress byproduct" concentrations (what every that's supposed to mean), unless the exercise in forced. As I mentioned before, the animals already do a fair amount of walking on their own initiative. In that case the actions taken to force the exercize would be causing the stress, not the exercise itself.

Correction # 3:
It is the intramuscular fat that is responsible for the great taste. Backfat is often cut off by consumers and not eaten due to texture issues, and sometime for cooking issues. Kobe beef is completely unlike anything raised for the general consumer market, so trying to draw conclusions based on that niche market is inadvisable.

Re:Food?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Anytime a generalization is made, an obvious generalization, inevitably somebody pipes up with "but X is an exception" and seriously believes they have made a useful point. That's what you've done. It's like you seriously believe one should discard the fact that it's mostly fatties who use those scooters merely because you know one person who used them for another reason. You do realize that saying "I have never seen this" is not remotely the same thing as saying "this does not exist anywhere", right? This can't be a hard thing to understand unless of course your emotions about your mother's condition are overriding your reasoning. No offense, but that is your problem. Ever heard of the concept of the exceptions proving the rule? I'm sure you have and are choosing to ignore it.

Fact is, obesity is a real problem in America and elsewhere and has a great deal of impact on whether mobility devices like scooters are used. Fact is, unlike cancer patients, most fatties do have control over their condition and could work to change it. The reason they don't is that they want to blame genetics, being "big-boned", etc. rather than face the fact that they are responsible for their condition. Fact is, avodiing physical activity like walking (more like waddling in their case) is a great way to remain fat. Fact is, if you burn more calories than you eat you will lose weight -- you'd have to disprove some very fundamental laws of physics to argue otherwise. Fatties need to either consume fewer calories or burn more calories, or both, and their refusal to do so means they are choosing to be fatties. Choosing something means the person is not helpless but is actively making a lifestyle choice.

It's mysterious to me why fatties allow their condition to get so bad in the first place. They weren't born obese. It took time to happen. They became 10 pounds overweight and didn't do anything about it. Then they became 20 pounds overweight and still didn't see the writing on the wall. Then 30, then 50, etc. At any point along this progression, they could have said "hey, this is going to keep getting worse if I keep doing the same thing, but if I do something right now I can start reversing the damage before it progresses further." Yet they don't, because that would mean taking responsibility for their choices and they'd rather make excuses. Think about it this way -- if you cannot even take control over your own body because you don't believe it's worthwhile to care about yourself enough to do so, how can anyone argue with you? Why should they be concerned about you?

Oh and incidentally, if you've ever seen cancer patients you'd know it's quite easy to distinguish them from the morbidly obese. Cancer tends to make someone waste away, not become fat. If they are on chemeotherapy, the fact that this makes their hair fall out is also a dead giveaway. It just isn't difficult to tell the difference. That isn't the same as "judging" anything unless seeing a spade and calling it a spade is your idea of being judgmental. There is no criteria for "am I qualified?" when it comes to a personal opinion so there's no good reason for you to mention that. If I were an elected official who wanted to start taking away handicap cards and access to things like scooters, then and only then would you have a case for whether I need to be qualified to make medical assessments. Nice red herring there.

Re:Food?

[SirGarlon]

Why we insist on feeding 75% of our grain production to ruminants baffles me.

For beef cattle, we do it because they bulk up faster on grain than on grass. It is possible to buy range-fed beef, though if I recall it is substantially more expensive. The rancher is a business man and he makes better profits feeding grain to his cattle to get them ready for slaughter. This in turn enables him to sustain his (usually modest) livelihood and enable the consumer to afford beef as a staple rather than as a luxury. If all beef were range-fed then the economics of beef production would be totally different.

For dairy cattle, they are often range-fed in my region (New England) but due to freezing temperatures cattle have to be fed on silage in the winter. Otherwise they'd stop producing milk and we'd either have to import milk from outside the region, or go without.

So, we feed 75% of our grain production to cattle so we can have readily available beef and milk. Why we think we need so much beef is another question, and one that does make me scratch my head a little.

Re:Food?

[Pharmboy]

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

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

I was about to say, I pay $2 to $4 a bag for that stuff to put on my blueberries, blackberries, etc. Better yet: use human waste for lawns, fields and golf courses.

We cleared off 1/4 acre of wood (which was taken to the lumber mill and turned into railroad ties) and in order to get grass to grow in the poor soil, we hauled in a tandem load (about 11 cubic yards or about 9-10 cubic meters) of "sterilized compost" from the waste treatment plant. This means grass clippings, leaves and human poo, sterilized and composted, all "trash" that the county has to deal with. It costs $110, delivered, and we spread by hand. Best. Lawn. Ever. And no, it doesn't smell like poo, just a little like ammonia (like all compost) for a couple of days.

I'm a conservative who is a conservationist (ie: I have no use for environmentalists as I want to USE the resources we protect) and this is the right way to recycle and reuse, as it gives great results, cheaper, and creates less landfill, which is where it would have gone if I didn't spread it on the lawn. AND it allowed the waste plant to make a profit on something they normally would have to pay to dispose of.

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.

Re:Food?

[drinkypoo]

For beef cattle, we do it because they bulk up faster on grain than on grass. It is possible to buy range-fed beef, though if I recall it is substantially more expensive.

We eat beef primarily because they will stand in a feedlot and chew cud instead of breaking down fences or harming each other trying to escape, like Bison. Unfortunately, this feedlot approach results in sick animals, period, the end. So we treat the animals with antibiotics. The cattle can't move around so they don't develop any muscle tone. The result is insipid and often unsafe beef. Sure, it costs more to buy grass-fed, free-range beef, but the quality is superior in every way. Meanwhile, I'm buying buffalo meat at comparable prices; you can't put them in a feedlot, so all of them are grass fed. Actually, there is a movement today towards native grasses, at least in this country; native grasses don't ever need to be fed because they grow in what a permaculturist would call a guild, with each plant providing for its fellows. Some grasses anchor soil, some fix nitrogen, and some send deep tap roots to mine the lower parts of the soil for minerals. This native grass will support nearly any kind of animal; the "improved" grasses commonly planted for animal grazing tend to be species-specific. For instance, the pasture mejorado being planted in Panama causes increased beef production in the cows, but a horse will starve in the field. And more importantly for the beef, it produces a lower quality of meat with reduced flavor and texture as compared to the native grasses. So ranchers who are aiming for quality rather than quantity are very much replanting their ranges in native grass.

So, we feed 75% of our grain production to cattle so we can have readily available beef and milk. Why we think we need so much beef is another question, and one that does make me scratch my head a little.

Beef is delicious. The real question is why we need so much milk. Milk subsidies in the USA led to the production of milk hormones to increase their production... or was it the other way around? Thanks, Monsanto. Regardless, we produce so much milk that we have to invent new ways to get rid of it, which is why we got all that Recaldent-brand gum which is made from milk. It would be nice if we could get some milk paints out of it, so we could use less of the toxic bullshit housepaint that we tend to use, but I guess the chemical lobby would put a quick stop to that. The really sad part is that the rest of the world is less than interested in hormone-infested milk (rBGH has been proven to increase udder infections which means that milk with rBGH also has increased levels of both antibiotics and pus from infections in it... I like my milk with extra pus, how about you?) so the only place we can get rid of it internationally is those parachuted milk powder bombs that we keep dropping on the third world.

Ending all food subsidies would be a very good way to improve the quality of food production in the USA, not to mention, it would enable the free market to provide us with more logical foodstuffs.

What?

[sbierwagen]

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

Re:What?

[Explodicle]

It's used in conjunction with a form of nuclear fusion. Just an intermediate step before plugging them into the Meatrix.

Re:What?

[quenda]

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

But it's not as cool as...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

sharks with lasers.

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.

Torture? ASPCA should investigate.

[B5_geek]

There are two glaring faults with this setup:

#1) The cows are 'locked in'.
#2) The treadmill is inclined.

This results in the animal walking out of 'fear' from falling. The inability of the animal to stop whenever it wants is cruel treatment. On the other hand, if it were 'elective' and the cows got a special treat (a yummy grass/feed?) then it is a different story.

I would like to see how guy would like to be locked onto a treadmill 8hrs a day, walking uphill the entire time.

I doubt the quality of the milk would be very good. Stress does not make for a nice quality or quantity of milk. (I used to work on a dairy farm.)

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.

Re:Meat cows?

[ATestR]

One cow can produce about two kilowatts of electricity, enough energy to power four milking machines.

The real question is: Does it make the Milk tough?

Blasphemy!

[Locke2005]

How do the Hindus feel about their ancestors being forced into manual labor like this, when they could have used human beings instead? And how does the cost of buying and maintaining a cow treadmill compare to the cost of a solar power array that would generate 2 kilowatts without the constant trouble of cleaning all the cow shit off of it? Cows are one of the least efficient animals at turning grain into meat; I suspect they are also grossly inefficient at turning grain into power. If you take that same grain, ferment it, distill it, and use it to power an engine, how much more or less power output would you get?

This is hardly new...

[the_rajah]

In Lincoln's New Salem, near Springfield, Illinois, there is a reconstructed carding mill powered by a tilted tread wheel on which an ox walked to supply the power. This would have been in use around 1830.

Methane

[SteveFoerster]

Some people have joked about methane, but for those concerned about greenhouse gases, this would probably be worse than burning coal. Methane from livestock is a major source of greenhouse gases, to the point where one's personal impact on greenhouse gases is greater from giving up animal products than giving up one's car.

Re:Methane

[pehrs]

Methane has indeed a high global warming potential compared to CO2, however that calculation misses one important fact. And that is that methane has a rather limited limited lifetime in the atmosphere, around 12 years. After that it breaks down and to a large degree it goes back into circulation, becoming new methane eventually.

When you burn oil you release CO2 that has a life cycle of (conservatively) tens of thousands of years.

This means that if you kill off all cows and other methane production today you will see the methane effect start to wean after about a decade. Stop burning coal today and the effects will last longer than civilization has existed. As we are speaking of additive effects on the climate you quickly realize that you probably should be much more worried about the gases with long lifetimes and/or high GWP (CO2, HFC-23, SF6 etc) and less about those gases with short lifetimes/low GWP.