I saw a cow-milking robot today

Kaido

Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
Feb 14, 2004
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I really like automated solutions to things, starting with smarthome technology many years ago & then going into the professional side of things with being able to work on a variety of machine tools like multi-axis CNC machines, analog-to-digital machine conversions with retrofit kits, etc. in different types of shops, and lately branching off into food production automation (bakeries, chocolate chops, candy shops, pizza shops, etc.).

I had a chance to do some site visits this week, including one to a progressively automated production farm. I've done consulting with a few smaller farms before & have worked with neat stuff like GPS auto-steer tractors & so on (don't even get me started on the right-to-repair side of that story, ugh), but I've never seen dairy automation before. And it's BANANAS! Here's an intro video:


If you're up for a bit of reading, it's quite a well-thought-out ecosystem. The system breaks into 4 parts:

1. Collar tracker
2. Housing & cleaning
3. Feeding
4. Milking

So the workflow starts out like this:

1. Each cow has a collar around the neck, which is kind of like a Fitbit for the animal
2. There's a visual numbering system for the farmer
3. It can track all kinds of data, like rumination & how many minutes were spent feeding
4. It provides access to the automated & roboticized systems on the farm (like a wireless keyfob for a car)

Cleaning the animals & the housing, plus the housing itself, has added automation:

1. There's basically an industrial roomba that cleans the barn 24/7/365...it has water spray, scrubbers, and can be scheduled to avoid the cows based on a schedule. Even has a self-charging system! So the barn floor stays nice & clean all day long without human intervention.
2. Separately, there's a giant spinning brush, similar to the kind you see in a car wash. So basically a self-use cow massage. The cows looooooooove this thing!
3. There's a special walkway that acts as a footbath for cleaning their feet & to reduce diseases.
4. They have basically an industrial version of a home automation lighting system to provide the cows with stimulation lighting, as well as a special night-time mode. The cows need a full night's worth of darkness (8 hours), but they can't see red light very well, so the barn automation flips into "submarine mode" & turns on red lighting so you can work at night, but the cows can chill out.

Here's a video of the robot cleaner, and you can see their new robot feeding system in the background in some shots:


The feeding system has several options:

1. Calf feeding system, which is an automatic feeder that supplies milk at the proper temperature & tracks milk intake for each animal
2. Individual feeding system, which is used for a variety of reasons, like if a particular cow isn't getting its fair share & needs to have restricted access to food, or if you want to track food to milking ratios via data collection to get optimal results.
3. Automated bulk feeding system, so the cows can stick their heads out of the gate to get the feed
4. Robot management bulk feeding system, which ties in with #3. I didn't get a chance to see this (they were still building out their automated dairy production system), but here's a video of the unit in action - it reminded me a lot of those basic robots from Star Wars on Tatooine. It's basically just a glorified roomba, but still is a very cool system nonetheless! It can go from building to building too, using a line-following system (like those little kits you built from science magazines) & have basically a HomeLink system to open the garage doors by themselves. Really really clever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INbqPz5PxNg

The milking system is the most crazy part:

1. There's a NY subway-style access gate for releasing the cow to graze
2. The milking system is highly automated
3. The cows self-serve on the machine...as needed, they'll wander up to it to get milked
4. The system tracks which cows went through during the day & which need to be manually led over. They have Android & iPhone apps for alerts & data & all kinds of stuff:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lely-t4c-inherd-today/id628447660?mt=8

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nl.lely.mobile.tasks

The milking machine itself is pretty awesome:

1. The cow walks in & the system drops a gate around the animal
2. There's a robot arm that sticks out under the udder
3. A laser scans each teat & then places a suction tube on them one-by-one
4. When finished, a brush cleans the udder & then the brush gets a cleaning spray afterwards

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjSZMLhx4-I

From there, you can pipe it into your downstream milk management system, using compressed air instead of impeller blades, so that milk doesn't get messed with. The farm I was at ran it down a separate system, which eventually pasteurized it & bottled it. The milkfat content was nearly 4% & the quality was just phenomenal. Like, milk is good & all, especially with something like a cookie or some cereal, but this milk was so good that you could literally just drink it cold with nothing else & feel happy lol.

I dabble in a very small IT niche on the systems integration side of things, but it's super fun to see all of the insane progress wherein technology has been applied to centuries-old systems that humans have had to deal with. Not only is their integration incredible, but the variable nature of the automated milking system was just really amazing to see in action...I've never seen a physical machine tool handle that variable of an input system (animal size, animal weight, udder size, teat distribution on the udder, movement of the animal, all using laser scanners & other sensors to get it right & truly automate the milking process) & be as reliable & efficient as this setup was!

I don't know the exact specs, but each machine was slated for about 50 cows a day. Previously, the farm staff had to wake up crazy early in the morning and spend hours & hours milking a zillion cows, and skipping milking is not an option...even if they waited a few hours too long to milk the animals, the high-producers would wig out due to the pain, and could even get an infection & die from not being milked, so it's a critical job. This system basically automated it 98% of the way, save for a few cows that needed to be manually led to the machine for automated milking each day.

Anyway, I thought it was really cool, so I thought I'd share, especially since none of the other farms I've been too have had this level of automation installed on the premises...it was like looking into the future! The cows were happier, healthier, produced more milk, and reduced the manual workload requirement significantly. Also, if you're interested in the plant-based side of things (with enhanced technological integration), check out my other post here:

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/who-has-had-an-impossible-burger.2555102/#post-39608258
 
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paperfist

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The future looks strange. I wonder if cows would resist that or are they already accustom to having their udders accosted?

That little floor cleaning machine looks cool. I imagine it would take some time before it’s cost effective to have on patrolling the barn.
 

Mayne

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I went to a milk farm decades ago...it blew my mind that they also made the popsicles I loved.
 

Kaido

Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
Feb 14, 2004
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The future looks strange. I wonder if cows would resist that or are they already accustom to having their udders accosted?

That little floor cleaning machine looks cool. I imagine it would take some time before it’s cost effective to have on patrolling the barn.

They said all of the cows have to do initial training, but they pick up on it pretty quickly, and the cows like it better because they can self-serve as needed & also get an automated udder cleaning job done every time, so they actually get more milk out of them than just milking by hand (like if they need to be milked twice a day). Also, there's a huge reduction in labor because you can service 500 cows on just ten machines.

The floor cleaning machine isn't just about cleaning the floor, it's also about disease control. There's a lot of vectors to make cows sick & possibly die, so having a clean floor free from manure & other nasty stuff helps improve herd health. One of the automated gates they have is a foot bath, kind of like a TSA checkpoint, because apparently they can get hoof issues & diseases pretty easily, so simply having them hang out in a water bath for a minute can help negate those issues.

The machines were super cool to watch in action...it's a simple process for humans, but an extremely complex job for a machine, and yet they figured things out to the point where they basically have a 100% success rate & extremely reliable hardware that looks surprisingly easy to service.
 

Kaido

Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
Feb 14, 2004
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I bet the teat detector is really a mechanical Turk.

Hah, it was actually really neat...a laser would scan it (you could see it working) & would pop on one suction tube at a time. I took in a large amount of information that day, but I seem to remember there being a software map of the unique udder layout based on the RFID tag of each cow, so that the machine could get in position quickly. If you've ever seen a 5-axis CNC machine in action, it was basically acting exactly like that - really fun to watch. I've never seen anything like this as applied to animals, however, which made it even more impressive! I had no idea animal farming had gotten that far, technology-wise:

 

Kaido

Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
Feb 14, 2004
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Pretty neat but, I wonder if anyone but corporations can afford it.

I didn't ask for financial details, but there was one farm the next state over that only had 100 cows (2 machines) & they were able to justify the ROI with the automated gates, automatic milking machines, collar tagging system, etc. An article from last year says they run between $150k to $200k per machine:

https://articles.extension.org/pages/73995/dairy-robotic-milking-systems-what-are-the-economics

They have a calculator available, if you want to geek out a bit:

https://kotamine.shinyapps.io/RobotParlor/

One of the things that was most interesting to me is that they still had to be farmers...like in WALL-E, robots take care of every little thing & humans don't have to lift a finger. I have a decent smarthouse myself, with automated lights, locks, robot vacuum cleaners, and so on, and while it does make life more convenient, you still have to deal with the ongoing process of life. It's like what they say about being rich...it doesn't solve all your problems, but it makes dealing with them a lot more comfortable, haha! The farm workers I talked to really appreciated the machines because it meant they could have a largely normal schedule (no more 3 or 4am working mornings for milking) & focus on doing other things because that aspect of production & management was taken care of.
 

Kaido

Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
Feb 14, 2004
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Wow, high-tech. Pretty neat stuff!

Yeah - here's a good video of the entire milking process. I watched it for about half an hour in person & got to see the inner mechanics of the whole setup. The cows were literally lining up by themselves to use it! It was like a drive-through at McDonalds, haha!

One of the other neat things is that they use steam cleaning, which kills like 99.9% of the bad stuff from the process without having to use any soaps or detergents or anything, so it's both an extremely clean & low-maintenance operation:

 

Kaido

Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
Feb 14, 2004
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I went to a milk farm decades ago...it blew my mind that they also made the popsicles I loved.

Not gonna lie, I've been binging on their products all week. I picked up their dairy products at each site visit over the past week...my current gallon of milk in the fridge is whole milk 3.75% milkfat, it's udderly amazing :D The yogurt is just phenomenal, as are their cheeses & other products.

I ran into this situation a number of years ago with tomatoes...I was never a huge fan of tomatoes straight-up, because they always just tasted kinda bland, like water. Then a lady at one of my previous jobs brought in home-grown tomatoes & woooooow they tasted amazing! I never understood the appeal of a BLT before that because I had only had crappy tomatoes prior to that. I really like that we're using technology to bring food back to its roots (pun intended), where things actually taste good & are high-quality & aren't so far removed from how they should be grown (although, that doesn't necessarily mean in a field or a garden) that they're not as much fun to eat anymore.
 
Mar 11, 2004
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In my experience the farm hands they get for this are...not the best, so it probably is beneficial just to keep those shitheads away from the cows. Had a friend that worked on a dairy farm and sounded like the non-owner workers were borderline psychopaths (they'd zap cows with their tasers and laugh and other fucked up shit, many of them would get fired when caught doing that type of shit, its just it seemed like it attracted terrible people because not a lot of people wanna be smelling like cow shit and dried milk).
 
Mar 11, 2004
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Not gonna lie, I've been binging on their products all week. I picked up their dairy products at each site visit over the past week...my current gallon of milk in the fridge is whole milk 3.75% milkfat, it's udderly amazing :D The yogurt is just phenomenal, as are their cheeses & other products.

I ran into this situation a number of years ago with tomatoes...I was never a huge fan of tomatoes straight-up, because they always just tasted kinda bland, like water. Then a lady at one of my previous jobs brought in home-grown tomatoes & woooooow they tasted amazing! I never understood the appeal of a BLT before that because I had only had crappy tomatoes prior to that. I really like that we're using technology to bring food back to its roots (pun intended), where things actually taste good & are high-quality & aren't so far removed from how they should be grown (although, that doesn't necessarily mean in a field or a garden) that they're not as much fun to eat anymore.

Stop it. There's nothing nefarious being done with how food is grown (there's no "way it should be grown", let alone if you ignore how much food crop wasn't really very edible until humans started messing with plants). And "fun to eat"? Are you a 5 year old? Did you really not know about optimal growing seasons and picking times?

The problem is there's such demand that they grow and pick wholesale instead of just at optimal times, that alone makes all the difference in the world with what you're talking about (flavor). Buy out of season produce that likely had to be trucked in days away, yeah, its not gonna be the best). Also, holy shit some people apparently go out of their way to pick shitty produce or something (or the only place people are consuming produce is in restaurants and fast food places - both of which I personally think tend to be pretty damn terrible about produce they aren't masking with all sorts of seasoning and/or frying). I see people bitching all the time about tomatoes, but I can find tasty tomatoes in Wal-Mart's produce (let alone if I spent time checking out farmers markets or growing my own), so I don't know why people act like they can't find good tomatoes. Yes sometimes you'll get less than great ones but that's hardly some issue unique to modern farming. Growing your own you can still fuck things up and pick early or wait too long to pick and get less than great produce. Just like storing and consuming it makes a difference (i.e. a lot of produce, and tomatoes are one, are not going to do well sitting in the back of your fridge for a week and a half). Which I guess maybe I'm being harsh as I do think restaurants (not just fast food ones, frankly, I think mom and pop places often are the worst about this even) often have not good quality tomatoes. And the lettuce that it seems like most burger places have, ugh, its like they pay smokers to breathe on it just before serving it to you. Which I think its actually just the lettuce absorbing flavor from the burger patties, but because lettuce is so mild that the smoke/char/etc overwhelms it and makes it disgusting.

Yes it is cool that technology should enable us to pick more optimally (as well as optimize resources, water amount, cutting out pesticides - although like 95+% of those are naturally made by the plants so somewhat ironically to make pesticide free we'll have to genetically modify them out; and also help keep contaminants out; oh and get them from picking to people even quicker by being able to house growing facilities pretty much anywhere, would be awesome to see grocery stores with greenhouses on their roofs), but people need to stop this bullshit idiocy and realize why the food is the way it is. Its not because some huge corporation is trying to deliberately poison you (ok, well soft drinks and alochol actually would kinda be that) or various other nonsense. Not saying you're being as stupid as the people doing all that, but the dumb shit "Subway bread uses a - oh my gawwwwd, chemical!?!?!?! - that's use in yoga mats!" or the recent freakout over La Croix, by people who "want to know what's in their food" but refuse to understand jack shit. Well, I wish it would stop.

Sorry for the rant, just sick of the way a lot of stupid people are going about this stuff. I don't know that you've been that way, but you tread kinda close sometimes.

For tomatoes, in season, and local (or grow yourself, there's actually little self contained kits where you can grow like a few tomatoes in your own home) and do not put them in the fridge until after you've cut them (cold temperatures are bad on the flavor bits of tomatoes), will offer the best flavor. And at the supermarket, not too hard or too soft. I don't know that coloring will alone even tell you either as they've modified some veggies to be more colorful. Even Wal-Mart sells like 4 packs of the smaller tomatoes that are still on the vine too, and they tend to be pretty flavorful.
 

Kaido

Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
Feb 14, 2004
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Stop it. There's nothing nefarious being done with how food is grown (there's no "way it should be grown", let alone if you ignore how much food crop wasn't really very edible until humans started messing with plants). And "fun to eat"? Are you a 5 year old? Did you really not know about optimal growing seasons and picking times?

Yes, fun to eat! So that was exactly my point:
I really like that we're using technology to bring food back to its roots (pun intended), where things actually taste good & are high-quality & aren't so far removed from how they should be grown (although, that doesn't necessarily mean in a field or a garden) that they're not as much fun to eat anymore.

I should clarify - grown AND picked & presented; I meant the entire chain to the consumer. And you're right about the production problem of demand vs. picking at optimal times, for sure. Tomatoes, specifically - what traditionally happens is:

1. Tomatoes are grown (variety of ways...field, hothouse, etc.)
2. Picked green
3. Washed
4. Waxed
5. Gassed with ethylene to speed up ripening & change the color (either by a processor or the supermarket itself)
6. Put on a shelf as a shiny, red tomato - which is completely devoid of any flavor

These are the tomatoes I grew up with...flavorless, bland tomatoes that looked pretty, but tasted like, well, water. I literally didn't have a tomato that tasted like a tomato until my mid-20's & didn't understand the appeal of using them because I was under the impression that they weren't too great in their natural state, at least, not until I had a good one! That's why I said how they "should" be grown, which doesn't necessarily mean a field or a garden - when I get tomatoes these days, I typically get them from a local indoor hydroponics farm, which has a supply of vine-ripened red tomatoes available year-round thanks to a temperature-controlled environment - aka, where they're using technology to create good-tasting food with how a plant should be grown (grown, ripened naturally for optimum flavor, and then consumed).

Some produce handles gassing better than others. Bananas typically are pretty hardy, although once in awhile they'll goof up the gassing process & I'll get bananas that stay partially green, yet have brown sweet spots on them as they age on my countertop. Apples are a similar way - they pick them seasonally, and then store them indoors in controlled-atmosphere storage for up to a year, which contributes to the mealy texture. Then they sit on a shelf, shiny & covered in wax, looking pretty, but tasting mediocre with a lower-quality mouthfeel. However, with international shipping, we can sometimes get apples from other climates, and with a growing number of fruits being grown in controlled, indoor environments using aquaponics, hydroponics, and so on (to a lesser extend than bush & vine products, like tomatoes, because trees are a bit more of a bear to do indoors, especially due to the size vs. yield).
people need to stop this idiocy and realize why the food is the way it is. Its not because some huge corporation is trying to deliberately poison you (ok, well soft drinks and alochol actually would kinda be that) or various other nonsense. Not saying you're being as stupid as the people doing all that, but the dumb "Subway bread uses a chemical!?!?!?! - that's use in yoga mats!" or the recent freakout over La Croix, by people who "want to know what's in their food" but refuse to understand jack. Well, I wish it would stop.

This is a valid concern, because people freak out over things they don't understand. Take the humble banana, for example - it has plenty of unpronounceable chemicals in it:

NIsRThe.jpg


One of the leading people is in this arena is FoodBabe, who crusades publicly against what she "deems to be questionable ingredients":

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesal...as-activist-s-profile-grows-so-do-her-critics
Take, for example, Hari's campaign urging beer-makers to reveal the ingredients in their brews. Among the ingredients that concerned Hari was propylene glycol, a chemical used in antifreeze. But, as cancer surgeon and blogger David Gorski writes, the product used in some beers to stabilize foam is actually propylene glycol alginatewhich is derived from kelp. "It is not the same chemical as propylene glycol, not even close. It is not antifreeze," he wrote.

This is a growing issue because there are popular people out there on global platforms like television & the internet who actively are spreading misinformation, engaging in scaremongering, and bullying corporations to change things that don't need to be changed:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/23/rick-berman-exposure-of-food-babe-dr-oz/

You're also right about human intervention improving the food we eat - our food looks prettier, tastes better, and has less problems thanks to modern farming & farming methods cultivated in recent human history. Supposedly carrots, for example, were originally only white, yellow, or purple:

https://www.nextnature.net/2009/08/why-are-carrots-orange-it-is-political/

The story of certain people like Norman Borlaug, who modified the original behavior of specific foods like wheat, are pretty amazing. That guy is credited with preventing a billion deaths:

http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech-info/topics/borlaug/special.html


Food is a complex topic. I think food is better than it's ever been, and I think we're continuing to get better at it as we loop around from mass-production & a massive shipping industry back to focusing on getting good-quality food that isn't merely available, but also has the optimum taste, texture, and appearance. Which is partly why I think stuff like the robot cow milkers are so cool - it enables even small family farms (which make up a majority of the diary industry) to output a high-quality product at affordable prices.