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Cow Magnets

magnetsource.com

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Re: Cow Magnets

#31

Post by __bb »

eponeponepon wrote: post #12
omginternets wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems was a polite way of saying is . Even with a modestly-robust drone, there will be: - breakdowns - fuel costs (electrical or otherwise) - the need to run the task repeatedly , dealing with varying terrain and grazing cattle I'm as big a fan of drones and automation as the next guy, but it really is much simpler to just stick a magnet in every cow.

...it really is much simpler to just stick a magnet in every cow. Is it though? If you have twenty cows, sure, I can believe that twenty magnets are simple and cheap - but what about 200? 2,000? And what happens when one of your cows turns out to have a larger than usual pyloric sphincter, and the magnet gets into its intestines? Or a wider than standard trachea, leading to it regurgitating the magnet when it tries t…

It really is simpler, easier and cheaper to give the cows these magnet boluses.

- The magnets cost less than a dollar each once you're buying a couple of hundred. You can outfit a herd of probably 4-500 animals for the replacement cost of one cow.

- It takes less than a minute to administer each one

- I have never seen one passed into dung or regurgitated into the feed/bedding areas

A drone could perhaps scout a field, but it's challenging terrain: - You are looking for metal from the size of a paperclip up to the size of a large pack of gum across hundreds of acres of land

- You are searching in tangled grass (or other forage crop)

- How will the drone collect the items? Do you want a farm worker to come and collect each piece? They can be very hard to see.

As someone who has experience in this area (and likes his fancy tech) I honestly believe that the current tiered state is quite effective:

1. Metal detectors in foraging machinery. This stops and reverses the field machinery whenever it picks up something. You hop out of the tractor and fetch out the offending article. This gets the larger items

2. Magnets in feeder machines. This is one hell of a magnet that sits somewhere in the machine used to dispense feed. It picks up smaller items that may have bypasses the field kit. It once took me 5 minutes to get a screwdriver unstuck when installing one of these.

3. Magnets in cows. The items from the linked article.

EDIT: The ones I have seen are caged magnets which trap any metal inside a plastic cage, further removing pointed bits. Image search for "bovine caged magnet" shows different types.

Re: Cow Magnets

#34

Post by stephen »

omginternets wrote: post #3

You think that's weird? Wait until you read about cannulated cows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow There are a bunch of these grazing around my hometown university's ag department.

As a kid, we went on a field trip to a place that had a cannulated cow and they let us put a (gloved) hand in to feel what it was like.

...I forget if I actually did it, I remember it being warm and bumpy, but I might also be projecting memories of what the other kids said.

Re: Cow Magnets

#35

Post by ben0x539 »

omginternets wrote: post #25
eponeponepon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we can build a drone that also self-assembles a protective carapace of grass around itself while it browses around for metal. Alternatively, it could maybe shout "GO AWAY COWS" at random intervals.

And all this is still cheaper than buying magnets!

If you build the drone out of magnets, you can fall back to the original plan when it inevitably breaks down!

Re: Cow Magnets

#36

Post by DanBC »

eponeponepon wrote: post #12
omginternets wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems was a polite way of saying is . Even with a modestly-robust drone, there will be: - breakdowns - fuel costs (electrical or otherwise) - the need to run the task repeatedly , dealing with varying terrain and grazing cattle I'm as big a fan of drones and automation as the next guy, but it really is much simpler to just stick a magnet in every cow.

...it really is much simpler to just stick a magnet in every cow. Is it though? If you have twenty cows, sure, I can believe that twenty magnets are simple and cheap - but what about 200? 2,000? And what happens when one of your cows turns out to have a larger than usual pyloric sphincter, and the magnet gets into its intestines? Or a wider than standard trachea, leading to it regurgitating the magnet when it tries t…

Here's a BBC article from a Tiverton farmer saying the magnets sometimes come back up.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-12549492

I guess serial numbering would help get the magnets back to the right cow. But it doesn't matter if one or two come back up - you're aiming at herd immunity reducing the number of cows affected. Stopping most cases is good enough.

(Edit because omginternets is right)

Re: Cow Magnets

#37

Post by tgb »

Cows are hard to kill. My mother is a veterinarian and a professor of hers once told this story: He was on a farm treating a cow for calcium deficiency (common for dairy cows), which is easy to treat, you just pump a bunch of nutrients directly into the cow and they'll go from being more or less incapacitated to healthy in a short span. So there he was, IV into the cow and hooks up the bottle to it and empties it into the cow while talking to farm. Finishes up and goes to disconnect the bottle from the IV, looks at it, turns to the farmer and says, "I think I just bought your cow." It wasn't calcium replacement, it was Lysol that he had just dumped a liter of into the cow!

The cow lived, barely seemed to notice.

Re: Cow Magnets

#38

Post by omginternets »

DanBC wrote: post #36
eponeponepon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...it really is much simpler to just stick a magnet in every cow. Is it though? If you have twenty cows, sure, I can believe that twenty magnets are simple and cheap - but what about 200? 2,000? And what happens when one of your cows turns out to have a larger than usual pyloric sphincter, and the magnet gets into its intestines? Or a wider than standard trachea, leading to it regurgitating the magnet when it tries t…

Here's a BBC article from a Tiverton farmer saying the magnets sometimes come back up. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-12549492 I guess serial numbering would help get the magnets back to the right cow. But it doesn't matter if one or two come back up - you're aiming at herd immunity reducing the number of cows affected. Stopping most cases is good enough. (Edit because omginternets is right)

I think you're misusing the term "herd immunity". Herd immunity implies that the risk of an non-immunized individual contracting a disease is reduced because his chances of bumping into a sick individual is low.

I don't think this applies here, insofar as we're not talking about an infectious disease.

Re: Cow Magnets

#39

Post by omginternets »

ben0x539 wrote: post #35
omginternets wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all this is still cheaper than buying magnets!

If you build the drone out of magnets, you can fall back to the original plan when it inevitably breaks down!

Now you're thinking with por- ... I mean... magnets!

Re: Cow Magnets

#40

Post by tonyhburns »

omginternets wrote: post #3

You think that's weird? Wait until you read about cannulated cows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow There are a bunch of these grazing around my hometown university's ag department.

My girlfriend's sister is a grad student in the dairy nutrition program at the nearby university, and she gave me a tour of the farm where I saw a few cows with these. Like the article says, the device allows direct access to one of the cow's stomachs essentially. This lets the researchers take more direct samples of the stomach contents when testing different kinds of feed.
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