51–60 of 72 posts
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.
Rather than putting magnets in every cow why not clean the fields of injury causing debris? http://extension.missouri.edu/p/G7700 > From 55 to 75 percent of the cattle slaughtered in the eastern United States have been found to have hardware in the reticulum. However, no damage or perforations of the reticulum was evident. [...] > The magnet simply keeps foreign metallic objects adhered together in a ball, reducing t…
Easier said than done. I live on a small farm with horses. Even after all these years, we still find barbed wire (very dangerous for prey animals whose response to danger is to bolt away at high speed) in the ground, or in trees, miscellaneous bits of farm equipment debris that's decades old, and all sorts of metal embedded in the ground. All of this stuff was from before we moved here, it's just extremely difficult…
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Seems easier, sure - but one modestly-robust drone, maybe a sort of lawnmower with caterpillar tracks, could happily roam around the pasture permanently, picking up ferrous debris and taking it back to a drop-off point for recycling.
I know, I'll use a drone! Now the cows are eating drone parts too!
I've yet to encounter an animal that wasn't destructive when it got bored! Maybe goldfish?
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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.
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Easier said than done. I live on a small farm with horses. Even after all these years, we still find barbed wire (very dangerous for prey animals whose response to danger is to bolt away at high speed) in the ground, or in trees, miscellaneous bits of farm equipment debris that's decades old, and all sorts of metal embedded in the ground. All of this stuff was from before we moved here, it's just extremely difficult…
Drive around with a generator and an electromagnet?
Not to mention that the ground isn't flat like a nice suburban lawn. There are creeks to cross, rocks (that we are constantly removing as water exposes them), fallen dead trees, tree stumps, wild grape vines, channels dug into the ground by rain. Obstacles galore!
You won't find many people more in favor of automation than me, but even I know when to stop.
Not that it isn't an interesting treatment idea the first time you see it.
What about non-magnetic metal debris?
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...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…
I take it you are from a US mid-west farming state that is pancake flat as far as the eye can see. Most of the corn fields where I live are neither flat nor level and are only a few hundred metres across. Even with high labour rates as they are here in Norway self driving combines are probably not an economic proposition. As for an outdoor Roomba, well the indoor variety wouldn't work in my house so what chance is th…
The cows get the bumpy fields, the tractors get the flat ones.