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].
Kind of a meta question: I'm often impressed by the sheer breadth of technologies you have at least a minimal, and often much deeper insight into.
Are you continually reading into different technology sectors? Working in some capacity as an investor? I'd like to read some of whatever you've been reading!
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.
> 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.
Worse for some suppliers, but better for customers. It's very nice of US and EU tax payers to give the rest of the world cheaper food. Just like it's nice of Chinese tax payers to give the rest of the world cheaper solar cells.
> Western masses are getting ever more poor [...]
Citation needed. Normal statistics say that 'western masses' are getting ever richer.
> Worse for some suppliers, but better for customers.
The problem is, it leads to cost-cutting and unsafe practices. The fact that American eggs and poultry meat need to be washed because it would otherwise be unsafe to eat from the horrible conditions the poultry is exposed to is telling enough.
> Citation needed. Normal statistics say that 'western masses' are getting ever richer.
Total wealth may grow but the distribution is ever more in favor of the ultra-rich [1]. Half of Americans report having to live paycheck to paycheck, mostly due to housing and fixed costs of living growing way faster than wages [2].
> The problem is, it leads to cost-cutting and unsafe practices. The fact that American eggs and poultry meat need to be washed because it would otherwise be unsafe to eat from the horrible conditions the poultry is exposed to is telling enough.
They only need to be washed, because that's what the regulations say. If the regulations say that they need to be save without washing, that's what farmers would deliver. Farmers in the EU aren't any less greedy.
People all across the wealth spectrum are getting richer.
But in any case, coming back to the 'milk glut': cheap milk makes more of a difference for poor people than for rich people.
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.)
They aren't really scheduling though. They can feel when their udders get full. It actually can be painful if you don't milk them on time. Its comparable to eating or drinking, they go eat when they feel hunger. It is pretty cool that they learn to associate the machine though, its not like it smells the way food does, or like there is any instinct involved.
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.
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.)
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.
Farm kid here. While it's true that farmers have an incentive to keep their animals in good condition, that's not the only incentive toward profit, and the bottom line often results in a pretty stressed, unhealthy animal that's in good enough condition to keep producing. If you can save $X by providing a minimum feed ration and leaving the cows in the care of the cheapest, least-caring employees you can find, and that reduces your milk check by less than $X, that's what's going to happen in a lot of cases, especially the larger operations.
(Not unlike human employers who have an incentive to treat their employees well but often don't.)
Farm organizations like to say farmers have every reason to keep their livestock in the best condition, implying that they're frolicking on pasture in peak health, but that's not really true. A lot of times it means miserable condition on concrete or a freezing feedlot. Livestock animals, like humans, are resilient and can keep producing through some pretty terrible treatment. The only ways to combat that seem to be A) customers who actively seek out farms that practice good animal welfare practices, or B) reasonable animal welfare laws.
"A somatic cell count (SCC) is a cell count of somatic cells in a fluid specimen, usually milk. In dairying, the SCC is an indicator of the quality of milk—specifically, its low likeliness to contain harmful bacteria, and thus its high food safety."
"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.
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.
Where I live, there are still some small, family-run dairies, and they all have customers who come to them looking for local, pasture-raised, raw milk. People will even break the law to get it, so there's definitely a market, but current regulations make it difficult to serve it.
Small, direct-to-customer farms are the ones most likely to lean into customer-pleasing animal welfare practices. But to profitably sell direct to customers within the law in most US jurisdictions, a dairy pretty much has to put in its own pasteurization setup, a major investment. That's kept dairy from developing the equivalent of cage-free eggs.
> the egg market in the US has gone from 4% cage-free in 2010 to 39.7% cage-free in 2024.
What does that really mean, though? A farmer down the road produces "free-range" chickens. While it is true that the operation is technically setup for it, which is what is required to meet certification, never in my life have I seen the barn doors open.
You don't ACTUALLY force "dark factory" to be completely pitch dark. That phrase just means they would not be required to follow legal light level requirements(there are such things) and technically considered a "dark" place.
No one buys pigs and cows grown chained inside abandoned mineshafts. It doesn't save any costs and just doesn't make sense.
I grew up on a farm, and worked at two others many years ago. We washed the teats before putting the machine on, and dipped them after. But yeah a mindless automaton wont sneeze, or forget to do their job :)
> 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.
The context was shoveling a barn, and you can't leave it until it dries out, can you? I don't know how often you have to clean a barn, or how long it takes for the manure to dry, but my naive assumption would be that it takes too long to dry for how often you need to shovel.
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.
>There are concerns about whether it is ethical to produce cockroach milk in bulk because it requires killing almost 1,000 cockroaches to extract 100 mL of milk.
I've heard the same ethical concerns raised about eating MAGA brains!
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.
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.
I'm the author of this piece, and I'm happy to tell you where it came from.
I was at a robotics conference in Boulder last spring, where some folks from Lely presented a paper on their robotic code of conduct. I hadn't heard of robots for cows before, and thought it was fascinating. I happened to be in Rotterdam last fall for another conference, which was close enough to the Lely headquarters for a visit.
Lely is somewhat unique in that they're a robotics company rather than an agricultural machinery company that also makes some robots. There are a few other companies that make robotic systems like these, but Lely is the largest by a significant margin. Farms will often choose what brand of robot to buy based on what service center is closest to them, in case something goes wrong. I believe that Lely promises that they'll have someone on-site to fix (or, start fixing) a broken robot within about 2 hours.
The majority of farms who switch to these robots keep them- an expert that we talked to said that it's not common to go back, and only a small percentage do.
> Lely is somewhat unique in that they're a robotics company rather than an agricultural machinery company that also makes some robots.
What equipment from the major agricultural manufacturers would you consider to be not robots these days? Even a simple tool like a field cultivator now employs robotics for things like keeping it at a precise depth, never mind the extensive robotics involved in more complex equipment.
There are some smaller companies still producing agricultural equipment that is not recognizable as a robot, but I'd consider that to be the exception rather than the norm.
Personally (and to some extent, professionally) I make a distinction between robotics and automation. In robotics, I look for a distinct, physically embodied system that can make decisions based on its environment and alter that environment by changing its behavior. Automation is much more limited and requires a much more structured environment. But it's all a matter of perspective.
Fair to say that it is a matter of perspective, but by your perspective the cultivator is a robot, right? A field is far less structured than a barn, and the tool makes decisions about how to alter its behaviour and environment in a pretty grand and visible fashion. Lely products are much closer to being automation in comparison.
Perhaps a more pedantic take is that the cultivator is simply attachment for the actual robot, which is the tractor. A cultivator on its own is useless. In that vein, there is seemingly a difference. Each product Lely sells is the full solution. Whereas John Deere gives you a menu and you have to select which "toppings" you want on your robot.
But then that gives nod to Lely products being closer to automation than robotics again. Beyond choosing a product at a high level, you don't have to get into the nitty gritty details because they will always operate in a comparatively strict and consistent environment.
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.
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
Yeah, that's overstating it. I help milk about 60 cows every weekend, and while there's certainly manure involved, and sometimes you get some on you, I've never been "shit and pissed on all day." I wouldn't go straight from the milking parlor to a date without a shower and a change of clothes, but that's true of any physical labor.
Yeah I dunno, having seen rotaries in action and knowing a little about the hygiene and efficiency requirements of modern dairy farming, there are several things in your description that don't add up for me
I've never milked in a rotary parlor, but I have worked in a farm with a regular parlor, as well as the traditional stall barn. I was way cleaner milking ~200 cows in a parlor vs ~40-70 in a stall barn. Obviously, clean is a relative term here :)
Makes me wonder if this is what we'll have to look forward to when there aren't enough youngsters to take care of us in our retirement. (This is meant as a humorous statement...with just a pause to indicate it's not completely humerous.)
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.
A documentary? Really? They have a long tradition of setting up scenes to show the view they want you to see. There is some fact behind some, but there is no requirement that they be true.
Cows don't run out of the barn in any case I've ever seen - they walk. The young calfs run out, but not the older cows. (and maybe some of the young cows). If you typical cow is running it is because she is scared.
Man, hear me out. You haven't even searched for it, and you make generalities to prove your point. Can you please give me benefit of the doubt until you've actually checked it out ? "Cow" is not a shitty partisan documentary, there's no narration at all, it simply presents the life of some cows in a medium exploitation in the UK through the seasons. It's quite unique. I've never seen another documentary like this one.
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.
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.
> Per Wikipedia, 74% of Canadian [...] dairy cows are.
1. Your link actually shows that 74% (now 73% as of the latest data) of Canadian diary barns (without robots) are tie-stall. That does not necessarily imply that the cows are kept in tie-stalls. When we still had cows in a tie-stall barn they were only tied during milking.
2. Nobody is realistically building new tie-stall barns. Especially in Canada where the law now makes that impractical (not completely impossible, but for all intents and purposes). Those that still exist are overwhelmingly old and therefore small. Despite tie-stall barns being most prevalent by a tidy margin, the same dataset again indicates that only 35% of the cows are in tie-stall barns. How many of them are kept in tie-stalls is, unfortunately, not enumerated in the data.
> 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.
Morally I don't think people have the right to place the bottom line above animal welfare so I wouldn't expect them to participate in that "game". I would expect them to pack up and say, nope, that's not how I will treat animals so this is not a business I want to be in. If the business is only feasible if you treat animals badly, then it shouldn't be a business in my opinion.
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.
The importance we assign the "bottom line" is totally made up, it doesn't absolve you from basic decency when dealing with other animals. If it affecting the bottom line is what stakeholders are concerned about, and they'd rather see other animals physically and psychologically suffer, then to me that signals a mental health issue that should be addressed. Why are those people so greedy, why have they lost their connection to the environment and other beings?
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.
Why is this comment offtopic? It literally asks why would a business want to invest in the system described by the article. That is as on-topic as it gets. Plus it got really good responses which taught me interesting facts about diary management, and cattle welfare.
I hear you, but the reason it seemed offtopic is that it spawned a large subthread about animal welfare/ethics vs economics/profit, which, whilst important, is separate from the topic of the main article. So then this tangential subthread took up a lot of space near the top of the main comment thread.
And the way the root comment began: "why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life?" seemed cynical and inflammatory; I'd hope HN readers would be mature enough to already understand that dairy cows’ quality of life matters both for ethical and economic reasons.
Anyway, I’ve left the subthread detached and downweighted but un-collapsed it. That way it's easy to find for people interested in that aspect of the topic, but doesn’t dominate the top of the thread.
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”
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.
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.
Exactly like a $3,000 laptop. $3,000 is insanely cheap when you think about it. With a $3,000 laptop in hand you can produce more value for the world than with tools that cost millions of dollars. Economies of scale is a weird and wonderful thing.
I’m not sure I’d agree with that. A skilled person can use a laptop to create a lot of value, but a laptop on its own isn’t going to produce much. (And a skilled programmer could produce nearly as much value with a $300 laptop.)
What value do you think a multi-million dollar passenger jet creates own its own, absent a skilled pilot and crew? But where skilled operators are at the helm, the laptop has the potential to create considerably more value, yet costs almost nothing. It is really quite amazing how cheap they have become. Early general-purpose computers did cost about as much as a jet, so them becoming dirt cheap wasn't a foregone conclusion. But we're lucky they did.
We can know the value of something by simply conducting an auction and seeing what it sells for; that's the floor of its value. We can establish the ceiling of its value by seeing what it retails for. Fancy Apple laptops float around $3,000. They're not worth more than that, and not worth less.
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.)
We use unskilled labour (cows) to perform the necessary chemical reactions to convert grass and water into milk. The milk needs to be pasteurised before it is fit to use and the cows produce a significant amount of manure.
I think we can do better by building vats to perform the same chemical reactions those cows perform.
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.
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 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.
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.
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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:
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.
Pretty primitive stuff compared to SOTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZ4DnVfWYQ
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!
Maybe it’s the skeptic in me, but the dude’s jacket seems CGI
Like Nikolai said, network is not so good - compяession artifact.
Sure but society is changed more yesterday's SOTA becoming commoditized and affordable than today's SOTA.
На земле сидел андроид, опустивши голову.
От чего тоскует робот? От апгрейда нового.
Ой да ты кака система! Как с тобой управиться?
О тебе ничё не знаем... Только нам всё нравится...
> These videos of robotic cow milking machines, feed mixers and distributers and pushers, and manure roombas are amazing!
These robots need to be named "moombas"
Laguna!
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Moomba
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moomba_Festival
The section on etymology is particularly amusing.
Wonderful comment and thanks for your gift to the lexicographical world of the word Poopoombas
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.
[1] https://roboticsbiz.com/top-9-best-robotic-milking-machines/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxhE53G3CUM
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].
[1]: https://www.cpb.nl/de-nederlandse-economie-in-historisch-per...
Now if we could only get root beer in the Netherland we could have root beer floats with all that ice cream!
Kind of a meta question: I'm often impressed by the sheer breadth of technologies you have at least a minimal, and often much deeper insight into.
Are you continually reading into different technology sectors? Working in some capacity as an investor? I'd like to read some of whatever you've been reading!
I just want to know where it's all going. My investing is mostly index funds at this point.
> All this stuff works fine. So there's a huge milk glut.
Well, you would expect a lowering of production costs to translate into a lowering of consumer prices in a competitive market?
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.
> 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.
Worse for some suppliers, but better for customers. It's very nice of US and EU tax payers to give the rest of the world cheaper food. Just like it's nice of Chinese tax payers to give the rest of the world cheaper solar cells.
> Western masses are getting ever more poor [...]
Citation needed. Normal statistics say that 'western masses' are getting ever richer.
> Worse for some suppliers, but better for customers.
The problem is, it leads to cost-cutting and unsafe practices. The fact that American eggs and poultry meat need to be washed because it would otherwise be unsafe to eat from the horrible conditions the poultry is exposed to is telling enough.
> Citation needed. Normal statistics say that 'western masses' are getting ever richer.
Total wealth may grow but the distribution is ever more in favor of the ultra-rich [1]. Half of Americans report having to live paycheck to paycheck, mostly due to housing and fixed costs of living growing way faster than wages [2].
[1] https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/19/bank-of-america-nearly-half-...
> The problem is, it leads to cost-cutting and unsafe practices. The fact that American eggs and poultry meat need to be washed because it would otherwise be unsafe to eat from the horrible conditions the poultry is exposed to is telling enough.
They only need to be washed, because that's what the regulations say. If the regulations say that they need to be save without washing, that's what farmers would deliver. Farmers in the EU aren't any less greedy.
People all across the wealth spectrum are getting richer.
But in any case, coming back to the 'milk glut': cheap milk makes more of a difference for poor people than for rich people.
> So there's a huge milk glut.
Doing my part. Mmmm, homemade yogurt.
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.
And how they had to inhibit greedy cows with the munchies from volunteering to be milked too often, just to get treats!
There are certain things you just can't predict, and have to learn in the field...
Do you think cows care about human interaction, or are indifferent whether it's a living creature or a robot?
Varies from cow to cow I guess.
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.)
(source: grew up on a tiny dairy farm)
Cows are herd animals and like to be in herds of 100-200. Most don't care about humans, though some enjoy pets from humans.
The fact that cows can self-schedule is kind of amazing
They aren't really scheduling though. They can feel when their udders get full. It actually can be painful if you don't milk them on time. Its comparable to eating or drinking, they go eat when they feel hunger. It is pretty cool that they learn to associate the machine though, its not like it smells the way food does, or like there is any instinct involved.
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.
The ironies of automation, a remarkably well studied topic.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
- https://www.complexcognition.co.uk/2021/06/ironies-of-automa...
I imagine it's gotten better with newer generations, but your point's a good reminder that "automation" doesn’t always mean "less work"
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.)
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.
Farm kid here. While it's true that farmers have an incentive to keep their animals in good condition, that's not the only incentive toward profit, and the bottom line often results in a pretty stressed, unhealthy animal that's in good enough condition to keep producing. If you can save $X by providing a minimum feed ration and leaving the cows in the care of the cheapest, least-caring employees you can find, and that reduces your milk check by less than $X, that's what's going to happen in a lot of cases, especially the larger operations.
(Not unlike human employers who have an incentive to treat their employees well but often don't.)
Farm organizations like to say farmers have every reason to keep their livestock in the best condition, implying that they're frolicking on pasture in peak health, but that's not really true. A lot of times it means miserable condition on concrete or a freezing feedlot. Livestock animals, like humans, are resilient and can keep producing through some pretty terrible treatment. The only ways to combat that seem to be A) customers who actively seek out farms that practice good animal welfare practices, or B) reasonable animal welfare laws.
"A somatic cell count (SCC) is a cell count of somatic cells in a fluid specimen, usually milk. In dairying, the SCC is an indicator of the quality of milk—specifically, its low likeliness to contain harmful bacteria, and thus its high food safety."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_count
"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.
https://www.machinemetrics.com/blog/lights-out-manufacturing
As far as why your scenario wouldn't happen: why would it? You can dream up anything you like, doesn't mean it makes sense.
All things being equal, why would you pay for lighting if you don't need it?
The assumption that all things are equal is the issue I have with your argument.
it’s mentioned many times in the linked article happy cows produce more milk
But do they produce enough more milk to offset the electric bill? That will make the decision, if a corporation is considering a "dark dairy."
But happy cows can cause unhappy roosters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up880afV_qs
Why would cows not need lighting?
Why would we stop at removing the human labor and doing the minimum required to keep cows alive?
We could not have cows at all: bioreactors producing milk from cell cultures.
https://jasbsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40104-02...
What are the risks of cell cultures develping cancer or even worse ejecting prions into the milk.
Ejecting/flushing them out periodically, and starting over, as it is done for many other agroindustrially used cell cultures already?
Cheese comes to mind, Qorn, aromes in cell cultures on wet sawdust sold as 'nature identical', countless more I don't remember ATM.
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.
Where I live, there are still some small, family-run dairies, and they all have customers who come to them looking for local, pasture-raised, raw milk. People will even break the law to get it, so there's definitely a market, but current regulations make it difficult to serve it.
Small, direct-to-customer farms are the ones most likely to lean into customer-pleasing animal welfare practices. But to profitably sell direct to customers within the law in most US jurisdictions, a dairy pretty much has to put in its own pasteurization setup, a major investment. That's kept dairy from developing the equivalent of cage-free eggs.
> the egg market in the US has gone from 4% cage-free in 2010 to 39.7% cage-free in 2024.
What does that really mean, though? A farmer down the road produces "free-range" chickens. While it is true that the operation is technically setup for it, which is what is required to meet certification, never in my life have I seen the barn doors open.
You don't ACTUALLY force "dark factory" to be completely pitch dark. That phrase just means they would not be required to follow legal light level requirements(there are such things) and technically considered a "dark" place.
No one buys pigs and cows grown chained inside abandoned mineshafts. It doesn't save any costs and just doesn't make sense.
[dead]
I toured a farm in the middle of nowhere in northern MN 7 years ago with this exact system.
Laser Guided Teat Seeking Milker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTERLJDKsIw
Automatic Crane feed loading system for the Roomba-like robots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDEIcZwQa-o
Reverse Roomba-like automatic feeding robot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-QFB827U-M
If anyone is near eastern Tennessee, I'd recommend the Sweetwater Valley Farm tour (in Sweetwater, TN).
They have the same Lely automatic milking machines from the article, and you can watch them do their thing.
Honestly, the teat-cleaning is the neatest part -- you realize how much more hygienic a mindless automaton can be.
I grew up on a farm, and worked at two others many years ago. We washed the teats before putting the machine on, and dipped them after. But yeah a mindless automaton wont sneeze, or forget to do their job :)
Honestly, it was Matrix-woah watching the machine laser-target a teat, wash it, then suction on. All gently enough the cow didn't care.
Turns out cow biscuits are a good motivator. (And taste kind of like wheat bran without any sugar and with more hay)
I saw eastern TN and got excited, but you just mean east-ish TN. Johnson City matters too!
TN has a lot of more-directions :D
All the love to east-of-Knoxville
"Quite a seven years ago", sounds like a Strong Bad-ism. "That's got like, WAY four more cylinders than the standard Nathan."
fixed
> 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.
Might be worth mentioning that half of that will be water content.
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.
its actually 70-90% water. it matters because water is very heavy, and whats left over will be dramatically less after it dries out.
its a large amount of waste, but its not 150lbs of solids
Yeah cow manure is VERY wet.
Compare to horse manure which is relatively dry, easy to shovel.
The context was shoveling a barn, and you can't leave it until it dries out, can you? I don't know how often you have to clean a barn, or how long it takes for the manure to dry, but my naive assumption would be that it takes too long to dry for how often you need to shovel.
You assumption is correct. It is scraped out while still wet.
Tangentially, that can be a job for robots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz4t0qIISTs
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.
We could even call it "plant-based milk".
Why stop at plants?
Cockroach Milk: Nutrition and Benefits:
https://www.medicinenet.com/cockroach_milk_nutrition_and_ben...
>Ethical concerns
>There are concerns about whether it is ethical to produce cockroach milk in bulk because it requires killing almost 1,000 cockroaches to extract 100 mL of milk.
I've heard the same ethical concerns raised about eating MAGA brains!
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:
https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
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.
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.
I'm the author of this piece, and I'm happy to tell you where it came from.
I was at a robotics conference in Boulder last spring, where some folks from Lely presented a paper on their robotic code of conduct. I hadn't heard of robots for cows before, and thought it was fascinating. I happened to be in Rotterdam last fall for another conference, which was close enough to the Lely headquarters for a visit.
Lely is somewhat unique in that they're a robotics company rather than an agricultural machinery company that also makes some robots. There are a few other companies that make robotic systems like these, but Lely is the largest by a significant margin. Farms will often choose what brand of robot to buy based on what service center is closest to them, in case something goes wrong. I believe that Lely promises that they'll have someone on-site to fix (or, start fixing) a broken robot within about 2 hours.
The majority of farms who switch to these robots keep them- an expert that we talked to said that it's not common to go back, and only a small percentage do.
> Lely is somewhat unique in that they're a robotics company rather than an agricultural machinery company that also makes some robots.
What equipment from the major agricultural manufacturers would you consider to be not robots these days? Even a simple tool like a field cultivator now employs robotics for things like keeping it at a precise depth, never mind the extensive robotics involved in more complex equipment.
There are some smaller companies still producing agricultural equipment that is not recognizable as a robot, but I'd consider that to be the exception rather than the norm.
Personally (and to some extent, professionally) I make a distinction between robotics and automation. In robotics, I look for a distinct, physically embodied system that can make decisions based on its environment and alter that environment by changing its behavior. Automation is much more limited and requires a much more structured environment. But it's all a matter of perspective.
Fair to say that it is a matter of perspective, but by your perspective the cultivator is a robot, right? A field is far less structured than a barn, and the tool makes decisions about how to alter its behaviour and environment in a pretty grand and visible fashion. Lely products are much closer to being automation in comparison.
Perhaps a more pedantic take is that the cultivator is simply attachment for the actual robot, which is the tractor. A cultivator on its own is useless. In that vein, there is seemingly a difference. Each product Lely sells is the full solution. Whereas John Deere gives you a menu and you have to select which "toppings" you want on your robot.
But then that gives nod to Lely products being closer to automation than robotics again. Beyond choosing a product at a high level, you don't have to get into the nitty gritty details because they will always operate in a comparatively strict and consistent environment.
Indeed, it reads as an advertisement.
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.
As you pointed, nothing about other brand.
All sunshine and rainbows..
If it's journalism, it's bad one.
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
Yeah, that's overstating it. I help milk about 60 cows every weekend, and while there's certainly manure involved, and sometimes you get some on you, I've never been "shit and pissed on all day." I wouldn't go straight from the milking parlor to a date without a shower and a change of clothes, but that's true of any physical labor.
It is a lot easier to stay clean when you are doing 60 cows rather than 4,500 cows on a rotary milker set 4 feet higher than you are.
Yeah I dunno, having seen rotaries in action and knowing a little about the hygiene and efficiency requirements of modern dairy farming, there are several things in your description that don't add up for me
I've never milked in a rotary parlor, but I have worked in a farm with a regular parlor, as well as the traditional stall barn. I was way cleaner milking ~200 cows in a parlor vs ~40-70 in a stall barn. Obviously, clean is a relative term here :)
Both Lely and DeLaval seems to have at least some customers with thousands of cows.
https://www.lelyna.com/us/farmer-stories/homestead-dairy-uti...
https://www.farmersjournal.ie/dairy/news/world-s-largest-rob...
Makes me wonder if this is what we'll have to look forward to when there aren't enough youngsters to take care of us in our retirement. (This is meant as a humorous statement...with just a pause to indicate it's not completely humerous.)
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 !
No practical experience here but from my YouTube adventures I've seen cows loving the warm fermented silage.
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.
> why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life?
Believe it or not, most people who go into animal husbandry do so because they enjoy working with animals and care deeply about their welfare.
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.
Please watch the documentary “Cow”, by the author of movies “Fish tank” and “American Honey” (both are unrelated to animals btw)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_(2021_film)
There’s a scene where cows finally run out of the barn at the beginning of spring. Their joy is obvious.
A documentary? Really? They have a long tradition of setting up scenes to show the view they want you to see. There is some fact behind some, but there is no requirement that they be true.
Cows don't run out of the barn in any case I've ever seen - they walk. The young calfs run out, but not the older cows. (and maybe some of the young cows). If you typical cow is running it is because she is scared.
Man, hear me out. You haven't even searched for it, and you make generalities to prove your point. Can you please give me benefit of the doubt until you've actually checked it out ? "Cow" is not a shitty partisan documentary, there's no narration at all, it simply presents the life of some cows in a medium exploitation in the UK through the seasons. It's quite unique. I've never seen another documentary like this one.
My seedbox is hosting it if you want to download it. It's not the most available file on the web: https://filebin.net/htjmlghpit9nzq84
Those are depressed and/or stressed cows. Normal ones even jump with joy, less so than young calves, but they do.
Intensive grazing (with rotation) is also better for the soil and plants.
The state of industrialized meat production seems to suggest the opposite.
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.
It’s well-known/textbook that there is an indirect correlation between animal stress levels and both milk quality and yield.
https://extension.umn.edu/dairy-handling-and-best-practices/...
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.
What countries keep cows in stalls? In Australia/NZ they free range...
Per Wikipedia, 74% of Canadian and 39% of American dairy cows are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tie_stall
> Per Wikipedia, 74% of Canadian [...] dairy cows are.
1. Your link actually shows that 74% (now 73% as of the latest data) of Canadian diary barns (without robots) are tie-stall. That does not necessarily imply that the cows are kept in tie-stalls. When we still had cows in a tie-stall barn they were only tied during milking.
2. Nobody is realistically building new tie-stall barns. Especially in Canada where the law now makes that impractical (not completely impossible, but for all intents and purposes). Those that still exist are overwhelmingly old and therefore small. Despite tie-stall barns being most prevalent by a tidy margin, the same dataset again indicates that only 35% of the cows are in tie-stall barns. How many of them are kept in tie-stalls is, unfortunately, not enumerated in the data.
Climate has something to do with that.
Canadian cows hate snow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9iiPOaJczE
> 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.
Maybe fewer vegans would be vegans if they knew that the farmers were prioritizing the wellbeing of the animals over their bottom line.
And as long as you still have a bottom line while reducing animal suffering, many farmers may be perfectly happy with that tradeoff.
They may see it as a win/win — they get to still run a business doing what they love, while caring for the animals they love.
And if they ultimately are more successful, maybe they reduce and/or “convert” the number of farmers that care less for their animals’ wellbeing.
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.
Morally I don't think people have the right to place the bottom line above animal welfare so I wouldn't expect them to participate in that "game". I would expect them to pack up and say, nope, that's not how I will treat animals so this is not a business I want to be in. If the business is only feasible if you treat animals badly, then it shouldn't be a business in my opinion.
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?
Animal welfare is pretty bad right now, so that is consistent with nobody caring.
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.
So, given that nobody cares, we don't need said laws, do we?
(I understand why you as an individual might desire them, but the world doesn't revolve around an individual)
Most people don’t care about most things we need laws for, that’s why we generally don’t use direct democracy.
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.
The importance we assign the "bottom line" is totally made up, it doesn't absolve you from basic decency when dealing with other animals. If it affecting the bottom line is what stakeholders are concerned about, and they'd rather see other animals physically and psychologically suffer, then to me that signals a mental health issue that should be addressed. Why are those people so greedy, why have they lost their connection to the environment and other beings?
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.
Because they are not terrible people? Or is that not "serious" enough?
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699358.
Why is this comment offtopic? It literally asks why would a business want to invest in the system described by the article. That is as on-topic as it gets. Plus it got really good responses which taught me interesting facts about diary management, and cattle welfare.
I hear you, but the reason it seemed offtopic is that it spawned a large subthread about animal welfare/ethics vs economics/profit, which, whilst important, is separate from the topic of the main article. So then this tangential subthread took up a lot of space near the top of the main comment thread.
And the way the root comment began: "why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life?" seemed cynical and inflammatory; I'd hope HN readers would be mature enough to already understand that dairy cows’ quality of life matters both for ethical and economic reasons.
Anyway, I’ve left the subthread detached and downweighted but un-collapsed it. That way it's easy to find for people interested in that aspect of the topic, but doesn’t dominate the top of the thread.
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”
This guy has been using the Lely feeder robots.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tdzo6cGVqU
He used to spend a lot of time feeding everyday.
Big respect to the design team thinking of cows as end users
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.
I want the AI overlords to install a cow brush in my living room.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZM4t6B4imVk
We have a cow brush and our cows do make it look like a lot of fun.
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How come no one makes fun of agriculture in america ?
If we can successfully produce agricultural products in America why is manufacturing impossible?
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".
This again!
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.
Or cheap stuff like $3,000 laptops?
Exactly like a $3,000 laptop. $3,000 is insanely cheap when you think about it. With a $3,000 laptop in hand you can produce more value for the world than with tools that cost millions of dollars. Economies of scale is a weird and wonderful thing.
I’m not sure I’d agree with that. A skilled person can use a laptop to create a lot of value, but a laptop on its own isn’t going to produce much. (And a skilled programmer could produce nearly as much value with a $300 laptop.)
What value do you think a multi-million dollar passenger jet creates own its own, absent a skilled pilot and crew? But where skilled operators are at the helm, the laptop has the potential to create considerably more value, yet costs almost nothing. It is really quite amazing how cheap they have become. Early general-purpose computers did cost about as much as a jet, so them becoming dirt cheap wasn't a foregone conclusion. But we're lucky they did.
We can know the value of something by simply conducting an auction and seeing what it sells for; that's the floor of its value. We can establish the ceiling of its value by seeing what it retails for. Fancy Apple laptops float around $3,000. They're not worth more than that, and not worth less.
What's the profit margin on that laptop?
For Apple (which is what I had in mind) I think they aim for 50%.
Very small % of our workforce works in the farm.
Also I think we manufactured a lot more things/value with a same number of people like 10 years ago but with mostly automated.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned that we have finally moved beyond the spherical cow approach: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
Cubic cows would be more efficient for packing
This is amazing! We need more automation in the world.
But how do they train the cow to stand in line to get milked? Why would a cow patiently wait in line to be milked?
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.)
We use unskilled labour (cows) to perform the necessary chemical reactions to convert grass and water into milk. The milk needs to be pasteurised before it is fit to use and the cows produce a significant amount of manure.
I think we can do better by building vats to perform the same chemical reactions those cows perform.
If it were unskilled, any cow would do, but if you've ever been on a dairy farm you'll know that not all cows make the cut.
whats happening to the cows is gonna happen to people too. thats where we are going folks.
What is going to happen? We will be milked to nourish our space alien overlords?
Robotic obstetricians
Vibe Farming ;)
I thought the title said "hairy" not "dairy" and thought maybe it was a soft robotics thing. Nope
Now I want a robotic farm management game like a cross between Factorio and SimFarm!
That sounds awesome. I’m in
Pathetic progress without people.
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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.
I always thought that would make more sense. Reminds me of some flavor text from the game Cruelty Squad:
Ticker: BRN
Name: Brain
Description: Raw material used by the AI industry
https://crueltysquad.fandom.com/wiki/Parts#BRN_-_Brain
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.
> It's funny how movies from the same rough period seem to be all similar underneath.
The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, eXistenZ... there was definitely something in the air at the close of the 90s.
Wait, are you connecting them only by overall aesthetics?
There's more to it than that.
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 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.
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.
Don't be so shallow! These robots allow them to focus more on animal care! They said so, so it's true.
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Ziz, is that you?
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Cows only produce milk as a result of being pregnant.
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