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

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

by irishjohnnie • 12 years ago

54 53 12 years ago

jobigoud• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

i lol'ed

bitJericho• 12 years ago

We should at least provide cow therapy.

arcadeparade4• 12 years ago

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

rch2• 12 years ago

I just picked up my first client in the sector last Friday.

pestaa2• 12 years ago

Can you discuss what you'll be doing?

ohthrowaway• 12 years ago

I'm very interested. Could you please elaborate some more?

searine• 12 years 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• 12 years 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 I'm pretty sure I saw a TV special too.

mrfusion• 12 years ago

How about robotic pest control?

Terr_• 12 years ago

I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit

Surely, these projects sow the seeds of eventual progress.

cpwright• 12 years 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.

arcadeparade4• 12 years 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.

HeyLaughingBoy• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

robotresearcher5• 12 years 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.

robotresearcher5• 12 years ago

The newly-cheap aerial photography with drones is going to have a big impact. It's starting already.

DanielBMarkham2• 12 years 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.

arcadeparade4• 12 years ago

There's already a prototype robot that brings cows in to be milked 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.

DanielBMarkham2• 12 years 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.

pestaa2• 12 years ago

I can't speak from experience, but driving a tractor on the field has an entirely different set of challenges compared to your regular car trip.

yaddayadda2• 12 years ago

Driverless tractors are already in use - http://www.asirobots.com/farming/

kcorbitt• 12 years ago

A tractor can make a lot more assumptions about its environment than a car can, and things like field topography/row direction can be programmed once and then just replayed. Automating them should be relatively simple (and it looks like it is being done [0]). I think the necessary algorithmic/sensor complexity is probably closer to a Roomba than a Google car.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor

noir_lord• 12 years ago

Farmers (here in the UK) have been pretty good jumping on technology, they have sophisticated navigation software, probes they use to assess crops before and during harvesting (down to which part to harvest with first).

Where I live they grow a lot of pea's and the period between "ready to harvest" and "pig food" is pretty short, it's a spectacular sight at night watching them go up and down the hills near here in the dark (always reminds me of War of the Worlds as they have rotating spotlights) harvesting.

Someone2• 12 years ago

"There's already a prototype robot that brings cows in to be milked"

Long-term, that is a dead end. The thing is, you don't have to bring in your cows, and certainly not all at the same time, if you have a milking robot. They will come in by themselves if they want to be milked.

Also, I find it curious that this is news. Milking robots have been used for decades (since the early 1990's)

Economically, we have about reached the point where the robot is economically feasible (a robot increases milk production, but costs money, both in investments and in electricity. It's not a given that the increase in milk production pays for the extra costs)

Qworg4• 12 years ago

"Driverless" tractors have been around for quite a while. Most large ag operations have very little human input when they're planting and harvesting.

yaddayadda2• 12 years ago

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.

Obligatory link to Manna (sci-fi story about robots and bots impact on humans) - http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

elecengin• 12 years ago

In college I worked on creating a robotic system for harvesting fruit (specifically, oranges and apples): 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.

thenewbtg2• 12 years ago

Instead of arguably, I think "currently" works better. We are currently much better robots at these tasks.

robotresearcher5• 12 years 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.

Qworg4• 12 years ago

I think this is overstated. Truck crops are certainly difficult, but row crops are mostly solved.

Automatic berry picking for "tree type" bushes is a reality as well.

andreis1• 12 years ago

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-robo...

frik4• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

frik4• 12 years 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#Con...

bayesianhorse5• 12 years 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!

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

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