With Farm Robotics, the Cows Decide When It’s Milking Time - NYTimes.com:
With Farm Robotics, the Cows Decide When It’s Milking Time - NYTimes.com:
“It just clicked,” said Susan Borden, Tom Borden’s 24-year-old daughter. “One day we came in and they had started milking themselves.”
Sure enough, on a recent Friday, the Bordens stood watch as cows lined up in front of the closet-size devices; each quietly allowed the machine to wash and scan its underbelly with lasers before attaching mechanical milk cups.
The cows ate the whole time, then moved along when the machine was finished. Nearby, another new device, a Roomba-style robot, pushed feed toward cows who lounged in a pen or lay on straw mats.
“We’re the most disruptive thing in here,” Mr. Borden said.
How do you fund deextinction and the rewilding of ecosystems forward to their next-natural state? What if you can make it pay for itself?
What if you can farm the rewilding with robots???
Why choose between domestication and the wild, that is so twentieth century binary thinking man. Embrace the xor!
Ride that paleo diet wave, and that suburban quest for authenticity via cable tv gurus: sell Auroch milk for $20 a litre in Williamsburg and to the greater citizens of Portlandia!
The first Boskarin cattle have now been released in the Velebit mountains. Part of the Taurus program to resurrect Europe’s only recently extinct ancient cattle:
The aurochs stands at the very roots of the whole idea of our continent but was sadly driven to its extinction by man. Luckily, it can also be brought back by man. In 2008, the Taurus Foundation decided to give the re-breeding of the aurochs a serious try. It has since grown into a joint effort together with Rewilding Europe and the Dutch organization ARK Nature. The end result will look like an aurochs, live like an aurochs, behave, eat, mate, defecate and eventually die like an aurochs. For the time being, this animal will be called the Tauros, the Greek word for the bull.
It’s 2017, and Oprah is saying: forget Quinoa, forget the ancient grains and antioxidant berries from the Amazon, try the milk of recently resurrected pre-domesticated cattle. The real, true superfoods harness the power of the palaeolithic, that Ice Age hardiness imbued unto you!
“Rumour has it this is what Cleopatra really bathed in,” the signs on the spas say.
Flown in by drones direct from the biomemetic milking stations built by anthropology majoring makers trained in augmented reality set design and custom blinds.
Untouched by a single human hand. Unseen by a single human eye. Reveal in the Authenticity consumers! Drink it in.
For an extra $99.99 you can have it tweaked with custom gut biota to cure all your ails.
And for 9,000 Euro you can have your own personal herd, visible to all your “friends” on Facebook via our special Farmville plugin.
It’s 2022 and the herds are now big enough to offer safaris for corporate retreats, buck’s nights and any other manner of escape.
Armed only flint knives chipped with the very finest rocks. Wearing only hare-skin loincloths. Juiced up with Neanderthal DNA temporarily spliced in by harmless virii. They hunt their food for the year on foot and gather tales enough to entertain the crowds at their neighbourhood barbecues. Watched over by fleets of robot medics, ready to resurrect them or repair any injury.
We get a restored ecosystem, a better gardened planet, and they get… fed body, soul and hyperego.
— don’t you just love it when a future path into a better gardened Earth practically writes itself?