I saw this on Oli’s Journal last night. It’s pretty cool but I find it more than a bit scary.
“Each cow wears a RFID tag that is used to coordinate her activities with a central computer. As a cow approaches the robotic milking pen, the computer reads the tag and determines whether or not the cow is scheduled to be milked, based on her stage of lactation and average daily output. If the cow is ready for milking, she is allowed into the pen. Once inside, a robotic arm washes her teats, latches on, and extracts the milk while the cow eats high-grade feed to make her happy. The milk output and feed input is recorded by the main computer and stored in a database, along with the total milking time, time/teat, and total time in pen. The farmer enters additional information into the database, such as a when a cow gives birth, becomes ill, or is sent for slaughter.”
Some clever people at Critical Media Lab have hooked this up to Twitter and the cows now broadcast things like “Got into the milking pen at Mon, May 10 ‘10 12:40 am and in 3:38 secs I pumped out a full 12.1 kg. Impressive!”.
I find this funny, incredibly interesting and terrifying at the same time.
