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Tux Can Even Milk Cows!
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Oct 23, 2005 02:12 AM
from the i-don't-have-it-that-good dept.
from the i-don't-have-it-that-good dept.
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."
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automated accident prevention? (Score:4, Funny)
It depends (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It depends (Score:3, Funny)
We can also power the computers using the cows. Once the cows have written a module to churn the milk into cheese, we dangle the cheese infront on them whilst they're on treadmills. Thus a perpetual
Re:automated accident prevention? (Score:5, Funny)
It will be a happy bull that wanders out.
Parent
automated accident prevention?-Foamy head. (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but your milkshakes are going to have an awful funny taste.
Parent
Re:automated accident prevention? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Parent
Re:automated accident prevention? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:automated accident prevention? (Score:3, Funny)
Ultimate geek tool (Score:5, Funny)
A tool for finding udders? I really do not want to see where this story ends up...
Re:Ultimate geek tool (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Ultimate geek tool (Score:3, Funny)
yeah this is rad (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Is this special? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.cornesag.com/eng/milking/astro.html [cornesag.com]
(Note: you should disable CSS for this site, the 'text-decoration : blink;' is horrible..)
I didn't read the article (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I didn't read the article (Score:3, Funny)
That's nothing... (Score:5, Funny)
Hard drive usage (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hard drive usage (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Data storage, and cheaper (Score:3, Informative)
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
Cheesy One Liners (Score:5, Funny)
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 saw this on TV (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:I saw this on TV (Score:4, Informative)
I wondered how this would fit in with the PETA crowd who thinks that cows hate what is happeneing while being milked.
I don't think any animal rightsists are against the act of milking. I think you do a little disservice to them to say that. You may or may not think the following is a problem, but here is the real point that PETA try to make:
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.(10)
Parent
Re:I saw this on TV (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Parent
Re:I saw this on TV (Score:4, Insightful)
Another example: I don't see how the data (I call it data, but it sounds more like empty claims) above shows that the breeding life is cut to half of the natural. They say that cows are rendered worthless to the dairy industry. Perhaps it means that instead of making 8 tons of milk each year they only make 5 tons. At that point it would become more profitable for the farm to slaughter the cow. As long as we are not against cowslaighter per se, I don't see what's wrong with that.
If PETA actually targeted their attacks somewhat instead of proclaiming that anyone who as much as looks at a cow the wrong way is a monster, they would get much more respect. I concede that the profit-driven (or subsudies-driven?) industry will happily spit on the well-being of cows, but why not attack their actual transgressions and not the whole concept of industrial farming? For example, why doesn't PETA attack specific farms (companies) that hold their cows in bad conditions, while co-operating with some other farms that do respect their bovine partners?
Parent
Re:I saw this on TV (Score:3, Interesting)
I will say this: they're right about the whole overloading the cattle to death.
It's not dropping from 8 tons to 5 tons. It's dropping from 8 tons to zero tons, because the cow dies.
What a lot of farmers don't realize is that running a cow at 8 tons a year (number pulled out of my ass), it'll die in five years (again, another number pulled out of my ass, but it's fairly accurate, from what I've heard), yielding 40 tons for the whole lifetime.
Milking 5 t
NOT fed "blood" (Score:4, Informative)
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 [farmllc.org] Cows optimized for dairy use are not optimized for nursing a calf (look at a side view of a Hereford versus a Holstein).
Parent
Selective Breeding (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
The man page is simple (Score:5, Funny)
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.
you mistyped.... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The man page is simple (Score:3, Funny)
Here's perhaps a program that follows more the Linux philosophy. Here's my Debian version of the script. (similar to the Gentoo one)
NAME
cowmilk - milks a cow
SYNOPSIS
cowmilk [options]
DESCRIPTION
cowmilk retrieves milk from a cow.
OPTIONS
wait for the bug fix (Score:4, Informative)
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.
In Soviet Russia... (Score:3, Funny)
Too much information (Score:4, Funny)
from the i-don't-have-it-that-good dept.
Thanks for sharing.
Now... (Score:3, Funny)
(I'm sorry...)
Down the road (Score:4, Informative)
I'm no farmer but... (Score:3, Informative)
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." [bagbalm.com] 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.
Re:Dare i ask (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Learning Curve (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Learning Curve (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Yes, they want to be milked (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes, they want to be milked (Score:3, Interesting)
All of these... but there is one additional cause: continued milking causes more milk production. So, if cows would be milked less and less each halfday, they would eventually stop giving milk. So the concern would not be so much that cows wouldn't visit the machine, but that they would leave it slightly early (not complet
Re:Learning Curve (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:What's wrong with manual labor? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:What's wrong with manual labor? (Score:3, Insightful)
This couldn't easily be done with a casual workforce - cows are normally on farms which tend to be some distance from population ce
Re:What's wrong with manual labor? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod parent up! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 s
Re:Mod parent up! (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably falling in your "right winger" category, I still agree with the rest of your post. No need to turn to name calling to make your point.
Parent
Re:GF -- not likely (Score:5, Funny)
No, but it could deflate her.
Parent
Re:How does it deal with infections/health issues? (Score:3, Informative)
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