Pretty primitive stuff compared to SOTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZ4DnVfWYQ

> 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"

Wonderful comment and thanks for your gift to the lexicographical world of the word Poopoombas

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...

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!

> 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?

> So there's a huge milk glut.

Doing my part. Mmmm, homemade yogurt.

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?

The fact that cows can self-schedule is kind of amazing

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"

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.

"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.

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...

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.

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.

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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.

"Quite a seven years ago", sounds like a Strong Bad-ism. "That's got like, WAY four more cylinders than the standard Nathan."

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.

We could even call it "plant-based milk".

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.

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.

> 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

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...

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.

> 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.

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.

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/...

>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...

> 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 they are not terrible people? Or is that not "serious" enough?

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699358.

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

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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.

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.

Cubic cows would be more efficient for packing

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.)

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.

What is going to happen? We will be milked to nourish our space alien overlords?

That sounds awesome. I’m in

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.

Don't be so shallow! These robots allow them to focus more on animal care! They said so, so it's true.

Ziz, is that you?

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