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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.)

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?

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.

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.

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.