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Cow Magnets
- DanBC 11y agoRather than putting magnets in every cow why not clean the fields of injury causing debris? http://extension.missouri.edu/p/G7700 http://extension.missouri.edu/p/G7700 > From 55 to 75 percent of the cattle slaughtered in the eastern United States have been found to have hardware in the reticulum. However, no damage or perforations of the reticulum was evident. [...] > The magnet simply keeps foreign metallic objects adhered together in a ball, reducing the chances of penetrating the reticulum. Of course, the best preventive measure is keeping feed bunks, pastures, cow lots, etc., free of potentially hazardous objects.
- omginternets 11y agoSeems easier to put a magnet in every cow than to comb every pasture, several times a year.
- eponeponepon 11y agoSeems easier, sure - but one modestly-robust drone, maybe a sort of lawnmower with caterpillar tracks, could happily roam around the pasture permanently, picking up ferrous debris and taking it back to a drop-off point for recycling.
- omginternets 11y agoSeems was a polite way of saying is. Even with a modestly-robust drone, there will be: - breakdowns - fuel costs (electrical or otherwise) - the need to run the task repeatedly, dealing with varying terrain and grazing cattle I'm as big a fan of drones and automation as the next guy, but it really is much simpler to just stick a magnet in every cow.
- eponeponepon 11y ago...it really is much simpler to just stick a magnet in every cow. Is it though? If you have twenty cows, sure, I can believe that twenty magnets are simple and cheap - but what about 200? 2,000? And what happens when one of your cows turns out to have a larger than usual pyloric sphincter, and the magnet gets into its intestines? Or a wider than standard trachea, leading to it regurgitating the magnet when it tries to chew the cud? Essentially what I'm envisaging is an outdoor Roomba that just gets left to do its own thing until it needs human assistance. Arable farming - at least at the larger end of the scale - is getting pretty comfortable with drone equipment, with driverless combine harvesters guided by GPS and similar things; livestock farmers are not going to be averse to it either (not least because farmers, in my experience, really dig flashy toys! :) ).
- rcfox 11y agoAt $2 - $5 per magnet, (as listed on that website, you could probably get them cheaper if you're outfitting a herd of 2000+) you'd have to cut a lot of corners to build something that can traverse a populated pasture and pick up tiny bits of metal and still come out as an economical choice.
- omginternets 11y agoNow do the math for the drones required to sweep the land for 200 cows, say, once a month. A spare wheel probably costs as much as a magnet. And don't forget that the metal being ingested isn't just sitting on the surface of the grass. In many cases, it's probably buried in the first 2 or 3 cm of topsoil and being turned up as the cattle uproot the grass. Is your drone going to handle this? Is it really handling all this at a price of sub-$20 per head over 10 years? I'd have to see it to believe it.
- bborud 11y agoFortunately this is knowable because sticking magnets in cows is something that we've done for many, many years. So we know what it costs and how effective it is. Whereas a robot to solve the problem doesn't yet exist. And the important bit here is to realize what the word "solve" means here. I'm not saying a workable solution will never exist, but in order to be as effective it would need to be orders of magnitude better at its job than a roomba is at its job. And what the roomba does isn't very hard to begin with. You would have to cover a very large area of sometimes pretty rough terrain every N days, and you would need to have a very high success rate at both detection and removal for the solution to be able to compete with the established practices. To understand the problem I can only recommend spending some time on a farm where they keep grazing cattle.
- ben0x539 11y agoI know, I'll use a drone! Now the cows are eating drone parts too!
- eponeponepon 11y agoPerhaps we can build a drone that also self-assembles a protective carapace of grass around itself while it browses around for metal. Alternatively, it could maybe shout "GO AWAY COWS" at random intervals.
- omginternets 11y agoAnd all this is still cheaper than buying magnets!
- ben0x539 11y agoIf you build the drone out of magnets, you can fall back to the original plan when it inevitably breaks down!
- omginternets 11y agoNow you're thinking with por- ... I mean... magnets!
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoI should laugh at this, but having had horses demolish the ($125 replacement cost) seat on my ATV because I was dumb enough to leave it in the pasture overnight, it hits a bit too close to home. I've yet to encounter an animal that wasn't destructive when it got bored! Maybe goldfish?
- ConceptJunkie 11y agoThat's great until a cow eats your drone. Then you'll need a _really_ big magnet. This probably isn't economically feasible yet, but I'm sure we'll see something like this in the next decade or two. And for that matter, such a drone could be cutting the grass or doing other similar jobs.
- moioci 11y agoCongratulations, you already have a semi-autonomous self-replicating metal-finding and collecting drone that also happens to produce meat and/or milk. Virtually zero additional overhead beyond the cost of the magnet.
- TheCondor 11y agoSome of the debris is intentional, like barb wire which those magnets accumulate a fair amount of.
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoEasier said than done. I live on a small farm with horses. Even after all these years, we still find barbed wire (very dangerous for prey animals whose response to danger is to bolt away at high speed) in the ground, or in trees, miscellaneous bits of farm equipment debris that's decades old, and all sorts of metal embedded in the ground. All of this stuff was from before we moved here, it's just extremely difficult to detect until you are literally standing over it.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoDrive around with a generator and an electromagnet?
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoMost of the stuff is not just lying on the surface; it's partly buried or covered. I've gone to cut down tree branches and found sections of barbed wire 6 feet off the ground because it rose as the tree grew and snapped off when it was pulled too taut. Not to mention that the ground isn't flat like a nice suburban lawn. There are creeks to cross, rocks (that we are constantly removing as water exposes them), fallen dead trees, tree stumps, wild grape vines, channels dug into the ground by rain. Obstacles galore! You won't find many people more in favor of automation than me, but even I know when to stop.
- toabi 11y agoThis makes me sad.
- omginternets 11y agoYou think that's weird? Wait until you read about cannulated cows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow There are a bunch of these grazing around my hometown university's ag department.
- jamessb 11y agoIn the 19th Centrury, everal experiments on human digestion were conducted on someone with a gunshot wound that left a fistula providing access to the stomach, somewhat like those cannula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beaumont#Experiments_with_St._Martin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beaumont#Experiments_w...
- stephen 11y agoAs a kid, we went on a field trip to a place that had a cannulated cow and they let us put a (gloved) hand in to feel what it was like. ...I forget if I actually did it, I remember it being warm and bumpy, but I might also be projecting memories of what the other kids said.
- tonyhburns 11y agoMy girlfriend's sister is a grad student in the dairy nutrition program at the nearby university, and she gave me a tour of the farm where I saw a few cows with these. Like the article says, the device allows direct access to one of the cow's stomachs essentially. This lets the researchers take more direct samples of the stomach contents when testing different kinds of feed.
- rootbear 11y agoThey had some of these at the University of Maryland at College Park when I was an Undergad.
- jkot 11y agoOne marwel super-hero has similar magnets inside him. Cowmen or something.
- larsmak 11y agoGrew up on a farm in Scandinavia and have witness a few of these up close. The amount of debris they can accumulate is staggering - mostly nails, and corroded clumps of metal (probably from old farming equipment). There was nothing particular about the fields where their food came from, in fact it would be considered very clean, almost ecological. But hundreds of years of harvesting will leave a footprint. Also, in the earlier days when renovation was not set in system they used to bury their trash (what else could they do really).
- louithethrid 11y agoMy father always explained that interest for rusty metall with the cows attempt to balance out a iron-deficiency. Could be wrong though. Found there behaviour always fascinating. They internal groom-group friendships and the one or two weakest cows they would trash up to feed them too any predator(yes, they have a social life in that way). Not happy how dairy farming selective breeding has crippled them. If you have to inject a hormon into a creature for milking, else it gets sick, you have overstreched it to the point of crippeling. still like farmers though and without them cows would go the way of everything wild in that juicebox that is earth.
- D-Coder 11y agoWho else was expecting an article on a new way to collect cows into one spot?
- ezequiel-garzon 11y agoWhat's the procedure to "deliver" the magnet? Surgery? Sedation?
- userbinator 11y agoLet the cow eat it, like it would the other things the magnet is supposed to protect against.
- ezequiel-garzon 11y agoThanks for your answer. I imagine you must control this, no? Too many magnets would probably be harmful. Also, they may be fairly larger than what cows usually eats. Do you know for a fact it's done like this?
- bborud 11y agoI can confirm this is how it is done. (I've done it a few times myself) The one I used looks a bit like this one: http://www.kruuse.com/en/ecom/Hest_produktionsdyr/Vommagneter_indgiver/prod_142070.aspx http://www.kruuse.com/en/ecom/Hest_produktionsdyr/Vommagnete...
- louithethrid 11y agoThere was a drencher for calves i had to use. On the instruction diagram on the side, everyone smiled, the farmer, the calf, a happy little world of forced feeding.
- bborud 11y agoFor scale: http://media-channel.nationalgeographic.com/media/uploads/photos/content/video/2013/01/11/14379075784_14379075784_WPOL8799TheCowWithAnimalMagnetism.jpg http://media-channel.nationalgeographic.com/media/uploads/ph...
- __bb 11y agoIt's a sort of plastic plunger. You load the caged magnet into the plunger and stick it in the back of the cows mouth. Press the plunger and the cow swallows it. Kind of like giving your pet a tablet, but bigger.
- timthorn 11y agoThere are a couple of solutions taking the standard bolus and turning it into a connected pH sensor to monitor cattle health: https://connect.innovateuk.org/documents/3285671/6079410/Smart+Sensor+to+Improve+Cow+Health.pdf/7a583c15-2d62-4916-b830-f84c7eb57ffc https://connect.innovateuk.org/documents/3285671/6079410/Sma... http://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/Presentation/ConnectedDevices_22.01.13_DavidTegerdine_TTP-WellCow.pdf http://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/Presentation/ConnectedDev... http://www.wellcow.co.uk http://www.wellcow.co.uk http://www.ecow.co.uk http://www.ecow.co.uk
- bborud 11y agoMy parents are vets (in Norway). The magnets I remember them using about 30 years ago were about 10cm long rods with a elongated plastic cage around them -- to offset the sharp ands of nails etc to protect the tissue.
- hackaflocka 11y agoWhat about non-magnetic metal debris?
- sitharus 11y agoNot very common on a farm, nails and wire are always steel. Non-ferrous metals wouldn't be strong enough.
- Zigurd 11y agoHas this been taken into account regarding the magnetically aligned cow theory?
- tgb 11y agoCows are hard to kill. My mother is a veterinarian and a professor of hers once told this story: He was on a farm treating a cow for calcium deficiency (common for dairy cows), which is easy to treat, you just pump a bunch of nutrients directly into the cow and they'll go from being more or less incapacitated to healthy in a short span. So there he was, IV into the cow and hooks up the bottle to it and empties it into the cow while talking to farm. Finishes up and goes to disconnect the bottle from the IV, looks at it, turns to the farmer and says, "I think I just bought your cow." It wasn't calcium replacement, it was Lysol that he had just dumped a liter of into the cow! The cow lived, barely seemed to notice.
- comrh 11y agoWhy did he have Lysol in an IV though?! Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow
- deelowe 11y agoWondering the same thing. How would lysol end up in an IV?
- brianwawok 11y agoI assume it's a fill your own bag solution not a sterile bag that said medical grade lysol.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoHe filled up his own IV bag with Lysol? Makes no sense.
- lfowles 11y agoPerhaps generic Lysol. Generic white bottle with lots of text is common on ranches.
- VonGuard 11y agoDoes this mean I can stick things like refrigerator magnets to cows?
- reitanqild 11y agoRemember my dad mentioned these from time to time. Also I heard that local slaughterhouse staff were not allowed to tell when there was an emergency job as otherwise everyone would gather to see what this cow had eaten. (As mentioned nails and screws were common but i heard about one of them, not ours, eating a bunch of huge galvanized bolts. Investigation found out they were left behind by high voltage powerline technicians I think.)
- schoen 11y agoThere was a lot of trouble around the Buckyball magnets a few years ago, with the U.S. CPSC saying that they were unsafe for children because if a child swallowed two, they might attract one another from different locations within the child's digestive system and cause injury. (The manufacturer of Buckyballs was apparently very upset about the outcome.) It's interesting to think that swallowing magnets was seen as a serious threat to human digestive systems, but here is used to protect cows' digestive systems. Is the difference just in the cows' anatomy and the size of the magnet, so that this magnet is guaranteed to stay in the first stomach and not go any further, while human anatomy doesn't work that way? It seems like having cows swallow very small magnets (that can advance beyond the first stomach) would also tend to injure them, because those magnets could attract metal objects from one part of the digestive system toward another, as the CPSC feared with the Buckyballs.
- tired_man 11y agoThe cow are gets a single capsule (either a single alnico magnet or a plastic capsule with smaller ferrite magnets in it, but the same size) about the size of your thumb. It never passes from the first chamber. The Buckyball magnets are rare earth and much stronger than cow magnets. A kid who swallowed one might follow it up with another, or some bit of metal, after the first magnet entered the intestinal track and those two might snap together and cause damage. I think the problem is there whether it is a buckyball magnet or a stack of discs for some craft or hobby. Kids love those kinds of things. You just need to watch them like hawks and be careful what you leave laying around.
- Roboprog 11y agoSorry, but I had to laugh about this a little. Depending on where you grew up (and perhaps when), this article may or may not be news. Not that it isn't an interesting treatment idea the first time you see it.
- jff 11y agoUsed to play with these a lot as a kid. User "__bb" must have also spent some time on a cattle farm because everything (s)he's said about the magnets has been spot on.
- rowbear 11y agohttps://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14590-and-on-that-farm-the-cows-face-north--says-google/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14590-and-on-that-far...
- late2part 11y agoI wonder if these magnets would work in spherical cows.