7 ms·

With Farm Robotics, the Cows Decide When It’s Milking Time

54 points by irishjohnnie 12y ago

jobigoud 12y ago
I'm sure the cows like it better. But do they also get to decide to not get artificially inseminated each year and their calves taken away ?
- ftay 12y ago
  i lol'ed
- bitJericho 12y ago
  We should at least provide cow therapy.
arcadeparade 12y ago
I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit for hackers to make improvements to agriculture.
- rch 12y ago
  I just picked up my first client in the sector last Friday.
  - pestaa 12y ago
    Can you discuss what you'll be doing?
    - rch 12y ago
      It's probably not a big deal, but there are a few things to sign yet. Most of my analysis work is related to developing peptide-drug conjugates, so this will be a departure. The general idea is to improve on a specific QC process for acquired field data, adjusting correction factors on the basis of observed phenomena. The results should boil down to improved efficiency in some regard, but I'm not sure about the specifics yet.
  - ohthrowaway 12y ago
    I'm very interested. Could you please elaborate some more?
- searine 12y ago
  Yeah, definitely. The problem is that a farm is a dirty, corrosive, and stochastic place. Equipment needs to be tough as nails and able to deal with each unique farmers challenges. Things I see on the horizon : Robotic weeding is going to be a HUGE deal. Improved robotic harvesting also. These both are almost entirely reliant on robust computer vision that can survive days in the field. Drones are going to also be a huge deal. Imagine a quad copter that can go out and sample your 1000 hectares of fields, spotting disease or nutrient deficiency from images taken from above. The promise is big, but integrating tech seamlessly is going to be damn hard.
  - jerf 12y ago
    "Drones are going to also be a huge deal. Imagine a quad copter that can go out and sample your 1000 hectares of fields, spotting disease or nutrient deficiency from images taken from above." I believe that one is already a reality. Some quick Googling turns up: http://www.precisiondrone.com/drones-for-agriculture.html http://www.precisiondrone.com/drones-for-agriculture.html I'm pretty sure I saw a TV special too.
    - nulltype 12y ago
      You don't even need a drone for that: http://www.terravion.com/ http://www.terravion.com/
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      The FAA recently approved drones for agriculture use: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/faa-officially-permits-drone-use-by-famers http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/faa-officially-permits-d...
  - mrfusion 12y ago
    How about robotic pest control?
- Terr_ 12y ago
  > I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit Surely, these projects sow the seeds of eventual progress.
- cpwright 12y ago
  I don't know if this is meant to be pithy or serious, but I think I disagree. Agriculture is big business, farmers are smart people, and there is a history of lots of mechanization and interesting technology being applied. The productivity gains that we've already seen in the last hundred years (and before) are tremendous. I'm sure that there are areas to be improved upon, but I expect a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked, as it were. I also tend to think of farmers as the original hackers, they often have problems, and they cobble together a solution that might not be pretty, but works.
  - arcadeparade 12y ago
    I'm being serious. I come from a farming family and see companies selling new technology at huge prices, and other areas where nothing has been done. Once I finished some other projects I'll looking into Arduino or something similar to start hacking at some ideas I have. By the way, you are indeed right that farmers have already done most of the hacking themselves.
    - Qworg 12y ago
      I'm interested in your opinions on holes in the market - is it a cost thing? Also, if you want to bounce ideas around, my email is in my profile.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
    He's right. I don't know about openings where absolutely nothing is being done, but I see opportunities for simplifying and bringing costs down. A lot of farm machinery is geared towards large producers with prices to match, leaving smaller farms to either DIY or do without. I have/had a few ideas I was researching and at least one I plan on testing on my own acreage this summer. Figuring out how to market to a population that doesn't seem to have a big online presence is the hurdle I haven't crossed yet.
  - irishjohnnie 12y ago
    Unfortunately, some of these productivity gains have been in the wrong direction from a sustainability and health standpoint. One of the things that I'm looking at (as a hobby research topic) are automating managed intensive rotational grazing for cattle and remote herd management.
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  Unless that was an excuse for a pun (and I have no problem with that), you are underestimating how much work has gone into farm automation. All the industrialized countries have worked on this for decades, with some successes (GPS-guided tractors with pesticide spay patterns guided by aerial photography, good old milking machines, etc). This is a multi-billion dollar business in most countries and also a strategic issue of food security. Israel in particular has spent a fortune on research into robotizing fruit production, since they have money but have complex relations with neighbours that make cheap labour immigration unreliable. They are working very hard on all the literal hanging fruit.
  - robotresearcher 12y ago
    The newly-cheap aerial photography with drones is going to have a big impact. It's starting already.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
One of the first stories I did as a freelancer, back in the early 80s, was about radio tracking collars being used on cows so that farmers could manage the herd better. So this is something in the robotics field that has been long-coming. If you'd like to get an idea of what the future holds for people, take a look at cows, a creature that has a lot of financial value. The idea is that the cow is tagged to be uniquely identified, when the cow approaches a service center, for say salt or food, the system reads the ID and delivers an appropriate form of nourishment. When the cow is uncomfortable due to lack of milking, the system milks the cow. Next up, I'm sure, will be automated detection of sick cows along with some basic veterinary interdiction. Finally it would be very easy to add a little bit of behavioral control to the system, either a mild shock, a noise, or some other stimulus to gently train the animal over time. I could even imagine a farm without fences, managed completely by robots and conditioned cows. The cows are happy, the people are happy. Pretty cool. Also a bit unnerving. I don't think there needs to be a robot revolt. I think over a few centuries they'll just slowly manage us into extinction, where we will most likely belong.
- arcadeparade 12y ago
  There's already a prototype robot that brings cows in to be milked http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24955943 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24955943 Once driverless cars are perfected, driverless tractors will be right there with them too, they will be hugely popular.
  - DanielBMarkham 12y ago
    I have it on good authority that driverless tractors are either already a reality, or very close to it. If you think about it, driverless tractors are a much easier problem than driving a car.
    - arcadeparade 12y ago
      Yes, although in Ireland at least, it's common for farms to be split up and require a lot of driving on public roads.
elecengin 12y ago
In college I worked on creating a robotic system for harvesting fruit (specifically, oranges and apples): http://digitalcommons.olin.edu/scope_2009/2/ http://digitalcommons.olin.edu/scope_2009/2/ Its amazing how difficult these problems are. This type of work relies on things that humans are optimized to do - forage and produce food. We are arguably the best robot for some of these tasks.
- thenewbtg 12y ago
  Instead of arguably, I think "currently" works better. We are currently much better robots at these tasks.
  - robotresearcher 12y ago
    We are currently much better than lime jello at these tasks, too. "Currently" implies an expectation that things will change, which is a claim that needs some kind of argument in support. Rhetoric alone doesn't advance the discussion.
    - thenewbtg 12y ago
      We are in the midst of a massive trend towards automation and robotics. Every year, we are seeing more tasks and more jobs successfully completed by robots, and more and more robots completing "work" tasks more efficiently than humans. I am not qualified to statistically prove the automation trend, but I believe you are being obtuse in rejecting the premise that said trend exists at all.
      - robotresearcher 12y ago
        Qworg said: "Its amazing how difficult these problems are. This type of work relies on things that humans are optimized to do - forage and produce food. We are arguably the best robot for some of these tasks." It really is amazing how difficult some of these problems are. That was the point of GP's post. By saying "currently" you wave away that point without addressing it. While robots are getting better, there are lots of things we take for granted about human and animal competence and that we have made very slow progress on replicating in robots. It's much more fun to think and talk about those tricky bits than to simply expect them to be solved. I don't need statistical proof that there is an automation trend. I'd like an argument about why the interesting hard parts are going to turn out to be doable. You might infer from my username that I am moderately optimistic.
andreis1 12y ago
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-robotics-the-cows-decide-when-its-milking-time.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-robo...
frik 12y ago
That's old news, such technology is available for several years. I have seen such systems in the early 1990s in Europe. The downside is that you need a lot of antibiotics for the cows. In the end, people will eat the meat and drink the milk of such animals plus a dose of antibiotics. More and more get an immunity. So worse is better. (aka low tech agriculture with less animals in one farm building)
- m_coder 12y ago
  I agree that this is old news, however, the comment about the antibiotics is not accurate. I visited an organic farmer last summer who was using a robotic milker for his 40 or so dairy cows. He was very happy with the system.
  - frik 12y ago
    How is my text about the antibiotics not accurate? I was writing about big farming companies with many cows. To keep a lot of animals healthy in a narrow space you have to inject each cow antibiotics in advance. Antibiotic in livestock is a real problem already - at least in the Europe. The media and the doctors speak open about the issues, yet some big farming companies don't care. Everyone is fine if farmer inject antibiotics to ill cows. But giving all cows antibiotics all the time (in advance), just in case, is the problem. People will drink & eat it and if they get ill or are in hospital, the same antibiotics has no good effect anymore. And people already die because the aftermath (hospital bug). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Concerns_about_antibiotic_resistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Con...
    - notdonspaulding 12y ago
      > How is my text about the antibiotics not accurate? It was inaccurate because the robotic milkers do not necessitate antibiotics in any way. There's no increased need for antibiotics because a cow is milked by a robot instead of a human. > Antibiotic in livestock is a real problem already In the dairy industry, if a cow is on antibiotics her milk is dumped at the order of the company that buys the milk for bottling and distribution to consumers. At least that's how it works on my neighbor's farm, who sells milk to a regional dairy distributor.
bayesianhorse 12y ago
I was actually most impressed by this little rotating robot. I actually had to this by hand some years ago, shoveling the feed so that the cows can get at it, and this rotating solution looks ingenious!

54 points by irishjohnnie 12y ago

I'm sure the cows like it better. But do they also get to decide to not get artificially inseminated each year and their calves taken away ?

ftay 12y ago
i lol'ed
bitJericho 12y ago
We should at least provide cow therapy.

arcadeparade 12y ago

I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit for hackers to make improvements to agriculture.

rch 12y ago
I just picked up my first client in the sector last Friday.
- pestaa 12y ago
  Can you discuss what you'll be doing?
  - rch 12y ago
    It's probably not a big deal, but there are a few things to sign yet. Most of my analysis work is related to developing peptide-drug conjugates, so this will be a departure. The general idea is to improve on a specific QC process for acquired field data, adjusting correction factors on the basis of observed phenomena. The results should boil down to improved efficiency in some regard, but I'm not sure about the specifics yet.
- ohthrowaway 12y ago
  I'm very interested. Could you please elaborate some more?
searine 12y ago
Yeah, definitely. The problem is that a farm is a dirty, corrosive, and stochastic place. Equipment needs to be tough as nails and able to deal with each unique farmers challenges. Things I see on the horizon : Robotic weeding is going to be a HUGE deal. Improved robotic harvesting also. These both are almost entirely reliant on robust computer vision that can survive days in the field. Drones are going to also be a huge deal. Imagine a quad copter that can go out and sample your 1000 hectares of fields, spotting disease or nutrient deficiency from images taken from above. The promise is big, but integrating tech seamlessly is going to be damn hard.
- jerf 12y ago
  "Drones are going to also be a huge deal. Imagine a quad copter that can go out and sample your 1000 hectares of fields, spotting disease or nutrient deficiency from images taken from above." I believe that one is already a reality. Some quick Googling turns up: http://www.precisiondrone.com/drones-for-agriculture.html http://www.precisiondrone.com/drones-for-agriculture.html I'm pretty sure I saw a TV special too.
  - nulltype 12y ago
    You don't even need a drone for that: http://www.terravion.com/ http://www.terravion.com/
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    The FAA recently approved drones for agriculture use: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/faa-officially-permits-drone-use-by-famers http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/faa-officially-permits-d...
- mrfusion 12y ago
  How about robotic pest control?
Terr_ 12y ago
> I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit Surely, these projects sow the seeds of eventual progress.
cpwright 12y ago
I don't know if this is meant to be pithy or serious, but I think I disagree. Agriculture is big business, farmers are smart people, and there is a history of lots of mechanization and interesting technology being applied. The productivity gains that we've already seen in the last hundred years (and before) are tremendous. I'm sure that there are areas to be improved upon, but I expect a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked, as it were. I also tend to think of farmers as the original hackers, they often have problems, and they cobble together a solution that might not be pretty, but works.
- arcadeparade 12y ago
  I'm being serious. I come from a farming family and see companies selling new technology at huge prices, and other areas where nothing has been done. Once I finished some other projects I'll looking into Arduino or something similar to start hacking at some ideas I have. By the way, you are indeed right that farmers have already done most of the hacking themselves.
  - Qworg 12y ago
    I'm interested in your opinions on holes in the market - is it a cost thing? Also, if you want to bounce ideas around, my email is in my profile.
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
  He's right. I don't know about openings where absolutely nothing is being done, but I see opportunities for simplifying and bringing costs down. A lot of farm machinery is geared towards large producers with prices to match, leaving smaller farms to either DIY or do without. I have/had a few ideas I was researching and at least one I plan on testing on my own acreage this summer. Figuring out how to market to a population that doesn't seem to have a big online presence is the hurdle I haven't crossed yet.
- irishjohnnie 12y ago
  Unfortunately, some of these productivity gains have been in the wrong direction from a sustainability and health standpoint. One of the things that I'm looking at (as a hobby research topic) are automating managed intensive rotational grazing for cattle and remote herd management.
robotresearcher 12y ago
Unless that was an excuse for a pun (and I have no problem with that), you are underestimating how much work has gone into farm automation. All the industrialized countries have worked on this for decades, with some successes (GPS-guided tractors with pesticide spay patterns guided by aerial photography, good old milking machines, etc). This is a multi-billion dollar business in most countries and also a strategic issue of food security. Israel in particular has spent a fortune on research into robotizing fruit production, since they have money but have complex relations with neighbours that make cheap labour immigration unreliable. They are working very hard on all the literal hanging fruit.
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  The newly-cheap aerial photography with drones is going to have a big impact. It's starting already.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

One of the first stories I did as a freelancer, back in the early 80s, was about radio tracking collars being used on cows so that farmers could manage the herd better. So this is something in the robotics field that has been long-coming. If you'd like to get an idea of what the future holds for people, take a look at cows, a creature that has a lot of financial value. The idea is that the cow is tagged to be uniquely identified, when the cow approaches a service center, for say salt or food, the system reads the ID and delivers an appropriate form of nourishment. When the cow is uncomfortable due to lack of milking, the system milks the cow. Next up, I'm sure, will be automated detection of sick cows along with some basic veterinary interdiction. Finally it would be very easy to add a little bit of behavioral control to the system, either a mild shock, a noise, or some other stimulus to gently train the animal over time. I could even imagine a farm without fences, managed completely by robots and conditioned cows. The cows are happy, the people are happy. Pretty cool. Also a bit unnerving. I don't think there needs to be a robot revolt. I think over a few centuries they'll just slowly manage us into extinction, where we will most likely belong.

arcadeparade 12y ago
There's already a prototype robot that brings cows in to be milked http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24955943 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24955943 Once driverless cars are perfected, driverless tractors will be right there with them too, they will be hugely popular.
- DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  I have it on good authority that driverless tractors are either already a reality, or very close to it. If you think about it, driverless tractors are a much easier problem than driving a car.
  - arcadeparade 12y ago
    Yes, although in Ireland at least, it's common for farms to be split up and require a lot of driving on public roads.

elecengin 12y ago

In college I worked on creating a robotic system for harvesting fruit (specifically, oranges and apples): http://digitalcommons.olin.edu/scope_2009/2/ http://digitalcommons.olin.edu/scope_2009/2/ Its amazing how difficult these problems are. This type of work relies on things that humans are optimized to do - forage and produce food. We are arguably the best robot for some of these tasks.

thenewbtg 12y ago
Instead of arguably, I think "currently" works better. We are currently much better robots at these tasks.
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  We are currently much better than lime jello at these tasks, too. "Currently" implies an expectation that things will change, which is a claim that needs some kind of argument in support. Rhetoric alone doesn't advance the discussion.
  - thenewbtg 12y ago
    We are in the midst of a massive trend towards automation and robotics. Every year, we are seeing more tasks and more jobs successfully completed by robots, and more and more robots completing "work" tasks more efficiently than humans. I am not qualified to statistically prove the automation trend, but I believe you are being obtuse in rejecting the premise that said trend exists at all.
    - robotresearcher 12y ago
      Qworg said: "Its amazing how difficult these problems are. This type of work relies on things that humans are optimized to do - forage and produce food. We are arguably the best robot for some of these tasks." It really is amazing how difficult some of these problems are. That was the point of GP's post. By saying "currently" you wave away that point without addressing it. While robots are getting better, there are lots of things we take for granted about human and animal competence and that we have made very slow progress on replicating in robots. It's much more fun to think and talk about those tricky bits than to simply expect them to be solved. I don't need statistical proof that there is an automation trend. I'd like an argument about why the interesting hard parts are going to turn out to be doable. You might infer from my username that I am moderately optimistic.

andreis1 12y ago

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-robotics-the-cows-decide-when-its-milking-time.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-robo...

frik 12y ago

That's old news, such technology is available for several years. I have seen such systems in the early 1990s in Europe. The downside is that you need a lot of antibiotics for the cows. In the end, people will eat the meat and drink the milk of such animals plus a dose of antibiotics. More and more get an immunity. So worse is better. (aka low tech agriculture with less animals in one farm building)

m_coder 12y ago
I agree that this is old news, however, the comment about the antibiotics is not accurate. I visited an organic farmer last summer who was using a robotic milker for his 40 or so dairy cows. He was very happy with the system.
- frik 12y ago
  How is my text about the antibiotics not accurate? I was writing about big farming companies with many cows. To keep a lot of animals healthy in a narrow space you have to inject each cow antibiotics in advance. Antibiotic in livestock is a real problem already - at least in the Europe. The media and the doctors speak open about the issues, yet some big farming companies don't care. Everyone is fine if farmer inject antibiotics to ill cows. But giving all cows antibiotics all the time (in advance), just in case, is the problem. People will drink & eat it and if they get ill or are in hospital, the same antibiotics has no good effect anymore. And people already die because the aftermath (hospital bug). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Concerns_about_antibiotic_resistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Con...
  - notdonspaulding 12y ago
    > How is my text about the antibiotics not accurate? It was inaccurate because the robotic milkers do not necessitate antibiotics in any way. There's no increased need for antibiotics because a cow is milked by a robot instead of a human. > Antibiotic in livestock is a real problem already In the dairy industry, if a cow is on antibiotics her milk is dumped at the order of the company that buys the milk for bottling and distribution to consumers. At least that's how it works on my neighbor's farm, who sells milk to a regional dairy distributor.

bayesianhorse 12y ago

I was actually most impressed by this little rotating robot. I actually had to this by hand some years ago, shoveling the feed so that the cows can get at it, and this rotating solution looks ingenious!