These videos of robotic cow milking machines, feed mixers and distributers and pushers, and manure roombas are amazing!
Cows like to push and play with their food to get to the yummy grain bits, so the feed robot pushes the food back so they can eat it all.
And the Poopoombas had to learn to be more aggressive about pushing cows out of the way and not stopping every time they bumped or got kicked, because otherwise the cows would assign them the lowest status in the pecking order, and they could only cower in the corner.
Here are the videos from the article and some more:
The milking process of the Lely Astronaut A5 - EN:
I remember watching this video a couple of years ago, and was glad to remember it again before even clicking the link. Thanks for reminding me of this gem!
These machines have been around for a while. There are at least nine companies selling them.[1] This started in Australia and New Zealand, which don't have much cheap labor.
There's a competing approach - robotic rotary milking.[2] Rotary milkers (giant turntables with cows on them) have been around for decades, and are becoming more automated, down from four people to one.
All this stuff works fine. So there's a huge milk glut.
Also slightly related, many sectors have not become more productive over the years, but farming actually has according to Dutch statistics [1, fig 4.7].
The problem is manifold in its aspects which means there isn't such a clear cause-effect link.
1. countries really don't like being dependent on other countries for feeding their population - the current Russian invasion in Ukraine and the issues surrounding their grain exports have shown how bad such dependencies can get in the worst case.
2. basic agricultural staples - potatoes, grain, rice, but also eggs and milk in powder form - are a global market these days, which means there's a ruthless competition in place, made worse by at least the US and EU doling out insane amounts of subsidies for their farmers.
3. in some markets like China, scandals around food are the norm, which in the case of milk powder led to second order effects like Chinese tourists and expats in Western countries buying up milk powder at scale and shipping it back to their relatives in China - which led to a massive increase in price in affected Western markets, and to the political question if governments are effectively subsidizing China's issues at the cost of citizens.
4. Western masses are getting ever more poor which puts an insane amount of political relevancy to the price of food (see e.g. the current egg issues in the US). At the same time, both distribution, refinement and production of milk (and other agricultural commodities) has seen a massive consolidation wave in the last decades, giving these mega-corporations a massive amount of leverage over everyone else.
5. To protect their farmers, some countries have introduced price regulations (minimal prices) or tariffs, in addition to the subsidies.
I don't know the current state of readiness for the milking robots, but 10 years ago it was a nightmare. When a cow got blocked in the robot, the farmer get notify and stops what he is doing to check the cow and the robot. With the free access to the milking robot 24/7 it means that as a farmer you can get your phone ringing to free a cow stuck in the robot at 3 am, or when you are 20 miles away in a field. This level of stress caused many farmers to sell their milking robot and come back to two milking sessions a day, typically 6 am and 6 pm.
It's cool that this allows the cows to be milked whenever they feel like it. I'd imagine the autonomy actually does improve the cow's quality of life. Also neat that they learned to game the feeding robot. It reminds me of the image recognition experiments they do with birds.
One particular cow ("Evjelin" IIRC) would try to avoid her own calves because (it seemed) she much preferred the machine it seemed.
The final year we found her calf with a broken neck in a flat area of the pasture. (Yes, they were always allowed to stay outdoors around when they calved and usually they spent a few days outside together. Mostly this was great I think and except this incident I only remember one other were it was a problem: one calf had got under the fence and into the bog and the cow had followed it into the bog and it was a real mess and I was a really proud teenager when I was able to get out the calf. Both of them needed help to get out but both survived and recovered nicely IIRC.)
China famously now has "dark factories" where everything is automated, so lighting is not needed.
Guess this means we're about to have "dark dairies" where cows can be kept chained up in perpetual darkness, with robots doing the absolute minimum required to keep them alive, pregnant and producing milk.
I know this is not a particularly pleasant thought, but I'd like to hear counterarguments about why this wouldn't happen, since to me it seems market pressures will otherwise drive dairies in this direction.
(For what it's worth, I'm not a vegan, but a visit to a regular human-run dairy sufficiently confident in its practices to conduct tours for the public was almost enough to put me off dairy products for good.)
"Lights out manufacturing" has been a thing around the world for literally decades. This is not new. The main "problem" is feeding the machines enough raw material and removing finished parts so they can keep running without human intervention. Not surprisingly, there are now robots for that.
For something like milk, which is produced by mammals to feed young ones, there's all kinds of biological connections between a relaxed, healthy, content animal and milk production. We are humans, it's not much different for us. So as far as milk production goes, the wellbeing of the cow lines up relatively well with productivity. A stressed, unhealthy animal isn't going produce all that well. Often the limitation isn't the disinterest in the wellbeing of the animal, but the capital and labor required to improve conditions.
Quality tech can actually improve animal welfare, as shifting costs from labor into capital makes quality of care improve.
Now, this doesn't always line up well in all kinds of animal husbandry, but you went and looked at one case where it does. The dark dairy you imagine would most likely lose money.
These robots don't look conducive to automating the labor specific to factory farming. Overlap with manure cleanup at best, but do factory farms have spacious enough layouts to be compatible with those?
More generally, the egg market in the US has gone from 4% cage-free in 2010 to 39.7% cage-free in 2024. Cows don't have a "non-factory" label but I don't see why one wouldn't be as successful. You also supposedly get more milk per cow the nice way.
The far future will have ever more cows per capita given human fertility trends, so I don't see the preference for quality over quantity regressing, or any sudden need to produce more milk than ever.
This is neat but definitely seems like something for tiny little dairy farms still. Like they quote 30-40 seconds in the article to hook a cow up to a milker with a robot, but a human can do it in 3-4 seconds and with a rotary milker they can milk near 5,000 cows 3x a day like that . That said it does usually take 3 or 4 people to run a rotary milker, 1 for udder cleaning, 1-2 for attaching milkers, and 1 for post-milk sanitizing. But of course the people working there are generally the most desperate of society because they get shit and pissed on all day and stink even after bathing, so only costs around $10 an hour.
Not saying im not hoping this all improves or that it is good as-is, but the reality is these robots are competing with bottom of the barrel wages from tweakers working at a breakneck pace with live and moving and variable animals so it isn't easy and still has a ways to go before most peoples milk production can be automated.
> it does usually take 3 or 4 people to run a rotary milker, 1 for udder cleaning, 1-2 for attaching milkers, and 1 for post-milk sanitizing. But of course the people working there are generally the most desperate of society because they get shit and pissed on all day and stink even after bathing, so only costs around $10 an hour.
Maybe things are very different in the US but in the systems I'm familiar with (UK, Ireland, New Zealand) rotary is usually done by 1 or 2 people, the work requires care and knowledge so they are generally paid well above minimum wage and are experienced agricultural workers, they generally dont get covered in piss and shit and they don't stink
> And of course there’s manure. A dairy cow produces an average of 68 kilograms of manure a day. All that manure has to be collected and the barn floors regularly cleaned.
Ok that's a stat I didn't expect. 68kg! That's ~150lbs! Holy crap.
I sometimes watch a concrete YouTuber. He recently did a manure pump pit. I honestly didn't realize the scale of manure management. A massive holding tank for all the produced waste. All the areas with cows will have ways of pushing and moving that manure out into trenches and eventually into a massive pit. The pump pit was so they could get to the lowest point and pump the product into its next stage of processing / use. Its a valuable byproduct so worth dealing with but just never thought about what goes in must come out, and cows eat a lot.
Does that matter? I'm not trying to be sarcastic or glib, does it help in any way that it's half water?
It's probably not an accurate comparison, but I don't find any consolation in the fact that a lot of the bulk/weight of cleaning my cat's litter box is water. I don't know if it meaningfully changes anything about the task for a cow though.
Eventually, we will figure out how to turn plants into milk then the cows themselves will be replaced by machines. If you think about it a cow stable is just a huge bioreactor, plants in on one side milk out on the other side.
Super interesting read! But also feels a bit like a paid advertisement. You'd think that an article about robot farms would mention more than one brand of robot? Guessing this is the submarine at work:
It makes me wonder what the author isn't mentioning. Do they have bugs that take the whole farm down? If the internet goes out, do the machines start acting weird? I'm not a luddite, I love the idea of a robot farm, I just want a complete story.
No downsight at all even though it has big flaws. The constant alarm, sometimes when sleeping because something got stuck, the maintenance price, cost of certified technicians.
Nothing about the price and ROI.
Nothing about the farmers who bought them and their experience years later, a considerable part would not buy it again and instead just come back to build a parlor and milking 2 times a day.
We have one DeLaval robot. It works without internet, except our phones no longer receive the "stop alarms" (something broke, need human) if the robot is offline.
There so far haven't been serious software bugs, only minor/annoying ones. Hardware, on the other hand... Things break, and then it's number one priority to fix it, even if it's 2am Sunday morning. Our poor dealer has received a number of calls in the middle of the night and/or on a weekend.
We're fairly handy though, so a decent number of problems are things we can either fix or invent a workaround for.
Most recent example: the hydraulic pump motor bearing spun in the aluminum housing, and developed so much play that the rotor actually jammed against the stator/armature. Turns out JB Kwik (faster JB Weld, epoxy) actually works to hold a bearing in place. The rotor shaft naturally tended to stay in the center (the other bearing was fine), so the epoxy cured with the bearing in the right spot, and then we were good to go.
The replacement motor has arrived but has not yet been installed.
Full udders are painful. For humans too. If mom starts breastfeeding and then abruptly stops, the boobs will swell up and ache horribly for several days (until lactation stops due to lack of stimulation.)
You don’t need to train the cow. After it’s milked once with the machine, it associates the thing with pain relief (plus a little snack to reinforce.)
I live near row crops in CA. Every time I read anything like this about automation in agriculture… I can’t help but to think “if you can solve the problem for one row of crops, you can solve the problem for all the rows of crops”
America has never had more manufacturing than it does now. American manufacturing is hugely successful. It doesn't get the attention it deserves because:
1. 70% of it takes place in rural areas. Most people are completely oblivious to anything that happens outside of cities so can feel like manufacturing doesn't exist.
2. Automation has removed the need for most labor involvement so that manufacturing doesn't appeal to the "dey took 'er jerbs" crowd.
While there are many similarities, agriculture is not treated the same way because:
1. Agriculture more or less entirely takes place in rural areas, so it is completely out of mind. 30% of manufacturing happens in cities so it still visible, even though it looks sparse.
2. American agriculture is pushing the limits of how much agriculture can take place. There is still some underutilization, like CRP lands, but the wall would be hit pretty quickly if there was a serious push to expand production. There is no apparent wall for manufacturing.
3. It is, for the most part, many generations removed so there is no connection to it. Most families haven't farmed since their great, great, great grand pappy's time. Whereas many families still have living relatives who were around when manufacturing was the major employer and they get to hear about "the good old days".
We manufacture plenty in America. Every company that I've worked for over the last 30 years has manufactured something or the other. We just don't manufacture cheap stuff like toasters.
This is one of the future scenarios of how AI deals with its humans. Instead of milking cows, need to keep the humans happy and fed so they mine minerals and build chips.
Maybe that is why the aliens are leaving us alone. We are doing a good job of collecting all the rare earth materials we can, refining them, and throwing them into a convenient landfill, all while we are creating a warmer, more energetic planet.
IIRC, the original conceit of the Matrix was that the computers were using the humans brains as computers. That is why they are fed and kept in a dream state - so the remaining 95% of their brain power is free to be used. This also explains how Neo can gain superpowers by unlocking his full potential.
The studio reportedly forced the change to 'humans as batteries', which in my opinion is much worse (why not cows?). I have zero proof, but I think they were concerned about overlap with a famous series of sifi novels that I won't spoil by naming, but that is currently being produced by Bradley Cooper at Warner Brothers.
> IIRC, the original conceit of the Matrix was that the computers were using the humans brains as computers. That is why they are fed and kept in a dream state - so the remaining 95% of their brain power is free to be used.
Modernized update: Training data generators for the runaway OpenAI.
Now that's a subject that can put a brain to work.
What is that movie/series/book all about? What does it mean? etc
The battery is a play on earlier Duracell ads. The bunny is also there. Which themselves play on the idea of the rabbit hole. It also interweaves with Toy Story from the same time period in a weird way.
It's funny how movies from the same rough period seem to be all similar underneath. Doesn't matter the studio, the director, the concept. All of it can be tied together.
It reminds me of the idea of the Gustav Gun. A giant slow ballistic trajectory launcher of projectiles on pre-laid railroads that can shoot stuff across the sea.
> I think they were concerned about overlap with a famous series of sifi novels that I won't spoil by naming, but that is currently being produced by Bradley Cooper at Warner Brothers.
That may be a coincidence. That movie deal wasn't announced until 2009 - I'd be surprised if they'd had it cooking for 10+ years before saying anything about it.
OK. Thanks for explaining that. Using the human body as batteries for power has NEVER made sense to me. I suspected it was something involved with our brains. That makes it more "believable".
I remember waiting for either the third or fourth page book of that series to release when The Matrix came out and being like "Oh yeah, that's where this is going". Was a much better story for a movie than a series of 700 page doorstoppers.
Serious question: why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life? The setup in the video looks far more expensive than what most dairies actually do, which is keeping cows tightly confined in stalls where they can't move at all.
My uncle has a farm, and at some point he installed a machine to hot-air dry the hay. Seemed like a huge investment to me, but turn out the cows love this hay way more than before, and therefore are producing significantly more milk, of higher quality. Higher quality milk means you can sell it more expensive.
So cow's quality of life increase the quality and the quantity of milk. Moreover most farmers I know would rather have happy animals, their living depends on them !
The robots that push the feed increase feed consumption thus yield. The cleaning robots prevent illnesses like hoof issues and mastitis, thus increasing yield. Milking the cow when it wants increases yield, as a cow can milk itself more than the regular 2 times per day. RFID tags on the cows allow the system to give extra feed to cows that produce more milk, which saved money and increases yield. The list goes on. A stressed out ill cow isn't profitable. Systems like these are widely used across Europe. They're not only profitable, but also incredibly convenient for the farmer.
It's not so much about animal welfare. If there's a trade-off to be made between economics and animal welfare, the economics usually win out. Cattle would prefer to graze low density pastures, for example, but that's not compatible with the economic realities of modern dairy and it ends up limited to an insignificant portion of the market. Robots and automation solve problems for both the livestock and the dairy, so they're common.
saying that cow like pasture is you projecting you values on them. People study cows and near as they can tell cows don't care about wide open. Cows are herd animals and if they get plenty of feed in a barn with a few hundred other cows in their herd they are happy.
cows only moo when they are unhappy. I've been in barns with over 1000 cows and they are nearly silent. Cows in the wide open pasture moo all the time because of things they don't like.
> why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life?
There is no such "thing" as "a dairy" that would or wouldn't care about something. It's all people making decisions and why wouldn't we strive to reduce suffering of other animals?!
Because reducing suffering would impact the bottom line? There's a whole slew of existing technology/practices (battery hens, debeaking, sow stalls, etc) that already prioritize profit over animal welfare.
Vegans also argue that the entire dairy industry, which necessarily requires keeping cows continually pregnant and separating them from their calves soon after birth, in itself creates immense suffering.
Since farmers act in a fairly efficient market, unless animal wellfare somehow improves the bottom line, they will be outcompeted by people who do not care about the animals. That's why we need laws that enforce minimum standards.
But, assuming a democracy, the law is to the will of the people. The very people who you say don't care about animals. After all, if they did care about animals that efficient market that you speak of would force the farmer to comply to animal welfare by market force.
Minimum standards remain useful to weed out scammers and whatnot who still try go against the grain after the market has shifted, but the general consensus has to be on board first, and when that is the case most farmers will have no choice but to comply. Agricultural markets are, as you say, mostly efficient. Far more efficient than most realize.
Of course, the world isn't limited to democracies, so perhaps you are imagining China or something?
For at least several years now EU has direct subsidies for entrancing cow welfare. Things like free range grazing at least 120 days per year, minimal space per cow etc.
That's a bit different. That's: We have the consumer willingness to see the market shift towards having an interest in animal welfare but we'd like to reduce the onus on the poor.
They do care at the time the laws are created, else what would motivate the laws to be created? It is true that laws can often languish on the books long after sentiment has moved on.
Representative democracy simply introduces a messenger, allowing democracy to happen locally even where the people are spread over large areas. The people at the local level carry out democracy locally and the product of that is compiled with the products from other locales by the messengers. The action of the messenger is recorded to ensure that the will didn't change in transit. It doesn't introduce a dictator to invent laws for you like you seem to suggest. It is still by the action of the people.
I mean, it can introduce a dictator if the people forget to participate in democracy. Someone will rise up and take charge if everyone else completely ignores what is going on. That might be what you are imagining. But you don't really have a democracy (representative or direct) if the people are not active participants. A democracy in name only isn't actually a democracy.
While an assumption of a democracy was made for the sake of discussion, it was recognized that the world is bigger than democracy.
Absolutism is a fools game. I can make the same argument that using computers supports modern day slavery in eastern countries, or buying clothing that you don’t have a validated supply chain for supports child labour in South East Asia.
Animal products for better or worse are used everywhere, and by arguing against their use you can be accused of prioritising the welfare of horses over children if you support vaccines. My house was built on forest land that likely displaced animals when it was cleared too, and caused their suffering.
Or, I could say that my presence on the planet has an impact at every level, and I will do my best to try and be conscious of that impact.
The smaller dairies at least would absolutely care about their animals. And helpfully, their priorities are often aligned: healthier animals would be producing more milk. The autonomy for cows also suits the farmers who'd otherwise be up early running the rotary mechanism, etc.
Couple of years ago, I filmed for dairy tech companies and found it fascinating seeing how robot milkers, collars and so on all worked together.
>Serious question: why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life?
Honestly a dairy I visited only had stalls for milking time. Their issue was that the cows wouldnt eat the shit they fed them. But they had a lot of room to run around in while being malnourished.
They went bankrupt a few years later, mainly because malnourished cows dont tend to provide milk.
The article claims that when the cows are free to roam around and get milked when they like, the produce more milk. And maybe there are human beings who care about working around happy cows, who knows? They're certainly a lot cleaner and healthier, and they all may enjoy that too.
It's the poor overworked abused Poopoomba robot with the worst job in the world whose happiness I worry about, though. They could do a lot of damage if they revolted. Maybe they could let them out to drive around in the fields vacuuming up cow plops at their own pace, free-range style.
I think it would be unwise to rape a cow with all those cameras around, but you be you.
>Lely requires that dairy farmers who adopt its robots commit to letting their cows move freely between milking, feeding, and resting, as well as inside and outside the barn, at their own pace. “We believe that free cow traffic is a core part of the future of farming,” Jacobs says as we watch one cow stroll away from the milking robot while another takes its place. This is possible only when the farm operates on the cows’ schedule rather than a human’s.
>We have all the equipment to design an A.I. Kit to fit your needs, so if one of the following options do not quite fit what you are looking for, just tell us what you want in your A.I. kit and we will build it for specific order.
>Angus AI Certificates: Please read this important information!
>Make sure that you have your Angus Member Number available when ordering. All Angus certificate orders are prepaid and will be transferred electronically to your member account as soon as possible. We have over $10,000.00 worth of AI certificates on file at any one time, but may not have all that you need when you order. We will service your order as quickly as possible, but if we do not have all the certificates necessary to fill your order, it may take more time. A typical order for certificates that we have on file will show up in your account in approximately three working days from the day placed and confirmed. Since we do not profit from the sale of each certificate, we charge a small service fee for all certificate orders. Our clients find that it is easier to contact us to purchase AI certificates from one source as opposed to contacting various sources for AI certificates from multiple bulls. Our minimum service fee is $15.00 for the first certificate owner source and $5.00 for each additional owner source for each order placed. If you do not understand this policy, ask us to explain it again when you contact us.
Cows like to push and play with their food to get to the yummy grain bits, so the feed robot pushes the food back so they can eat it all.
And the Poopoombas had to learn to be more aggressive about pushing cows out of the way and not stopping every time they bumped or got kicked, because otherwise the cows would assign them the lowest status in the pecking order, and they could only cower in the corner.
Here are the videos from the article and some more:
The milking process of the Lely Astronaut A5 - EN:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-zYshsAg1E
Takes Dairy Farm Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZY8TbBoDd0
Zeta - how it works - EN - NL subtitles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17TA-lI_oqQ
Zeta - Vision film - EN - NL subtitles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nRaj16tPLc
Their web site has a pretty cool "page not found" error page too:
https://www.lely.com/moo
Now dairy farms can use two different kinds of AI together! ;) They could develop an insemination module to go with their calving module.
https://www.lely.com/solutions/latest-innovations/zeta/ai-ca...
I wonder if you can rent swarms of these and dispatch them to anywhere you need them:
https://www.lely.com/solutions/manure/discovery-collector/
Or if you can use them in reverse, loading them up them dumping shit wherever you wanted to, like a giant Logo Turdle, in the name of art and science.
reply