On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 2:53 PM, Eugene Coyle <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm hoping that the astonishing technology shown in the video is not > missed because of the side discussion. The cows walk in from the field > when they choose to be milked, the machine takes over, uses lasers to find > the udder, which is then washed, and THEN the lasers FIND EACH INDIVIDUAL > TEAT. And, not a surprise, the machine records the milk production and the > cow's food consumption. > So I conclude that jobs are doomed. It is only a matter of time, > hopefully months, not years, before academic economists are treated the > same as the cows and the text books turned into cheese. > > As to the side discussion: Dairy farming has always kept cows lactating > -- nothing new caused by this technology, or by the earlier rival milking > machines. Only the farm subsidies specifically tailored to dairy farming > change over time to keep the mountain of cheese from diminishing. > The intensity with which dairy cows (and all farm animals) are exploited is, I believe, quite unprecedented in history. You can see this in statistics like the incidence of mastitis and in the total "productive" lifetime of dairy cows which I believe has been decreasing over the years. Now dairy cows only last 5 years or so from what I have read. The new robot technology sounds impressive, but all it is really doing is bringing factory farm techniques to small-scale farms. That cannot be a good thing for animal welfare, employment, the environment or anything else. -raghu.
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