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.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
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!
Readit News
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.
These robots need to be named "moombas"
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Moomba
The section on etymology is particularly amusing.
Deleted Comment
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
[1]: https://www.cpb.nl/de-nederlandse-economie-in-historisch-per...
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!
Well, you would expect a lowering of production costs to translate into a lowering of consumer prices in a competitive market?
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.
Doing my part. Mmmm, homemade yogurt.
There are certain things you just can't predict, and have to learn in the field...
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)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
- https://www.complexcognition.co.uk/2021/06/ironies-of-automa...
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.)
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.
(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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_count
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.
We could not have cows at all: bioreactors producing milk from cell cultures.
https://jasbsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40104-02...
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.
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.
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.
No one buys pigs and cows grown chained inside abandoned mineshafts. It doesn't save any costs and just doesn't make sense.
Dead Comment
Ok that's a stat I didn't expect. 68kg! That's ~150lbs! Holy crap.
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.
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
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.
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!