Earlier quoted context omitted.
He filled up his own IV bag with Lysol? Makes no sense.
Perhaps generic Lysol. Generic white bottle with lots of text is common on ranches.
Gross negligence at best?
Cow Magnets
61–70 of 72 posts
Re: Cow Magnets
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems easier to put a magnet in every cow than to comb every pasture, several times a year.
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.
Congratulations, you already have a semi-autonomous self-replicating metal-finding and collecting drone that also happens to produce meat and/or milk. Virtually zero additional overhead beyond the cost of the magnet.
Re: Cow Magnets
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
I agree with what you said, and can add a little more context to the subject.
I have a little experience with this subject. Some of my family once a month drive through grass fields to harvest hay which is chopped and delivered to dairy farms in the area. They range from several hundred heads to ~10k heads.
The fields aren't owned by the dairy farms, they're owned by field farmers and the hay is sold to the dairy farms. So the field farmers who already use old machines have no money, and no incentive to purchase and outfit a drone to comb their fields for metal.
So once a month the fields would have to be 'combed for metal', which is hundreds of acres spread out over different locations. However this still wouldn't stop everything because you have tractors, equipment, semis and trailers going through the field every month chopping and loading hay. So I suppose you would need to have the magnets on the end of the dump and push the hay through the magnets to make sure you're catching everything. This might sound complicated and cumbersome, because it is. On top of that, these trailers also have to be used for hauling corn, potatoes, manure, and everything in between. Even if you managed to do all that, there's still no guarantee that there won't be metal contamination between the time it's offloaded and fed to the cows.
That was a really long way of saying, it'd be nice, but it isn't practical.
Re: Cow Magnets
#64Used to play with these a lot as a kid. User "__bb" must have also spent some time on a cattle farm because everything (s)he's said about the magnets has been spot on.
Re: Cow Magnets
#65Re: Cow Magnets
#66Cows 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 int…
I spent a couple summers working on my uncle's ranch and I was actually sort of surprised at how lackadaisical vets could be when treating cattle. We had one cow with a soccer-ball sized lump on it's side, so my uncle called a vet in to have a look. The vet looked at it for all of five seconds before pulling out a knife and slashing the growth open. "Yep. Just pus". Indeed. Pus everywhere! The cow, being a marvel of well-bred placidity, just moo'ed and carried on chewing its cud. The vet prescribed some antibiotics and that was the end of it. I asked what had caused the pus to collect like that and the vet just shrugged.
We often think of cows as being dumb, but really, they're just bred to be calm and stoic. Imagine trying to treat a buffalo or moose the same way!
Re: Cow Magnets
#67Grew up on a farm in Scandinavia and have witness a few of these up close. The amount of debris they can accumulate is staggering - mostly nails, and corroded clumps of metal (probably from old farming equipment). There was nothing particular about the fields where their food came from, in fact it would be considered very clean, almost ecological. But hundreds of years of harvesting will leave a footprint. Also, in t…
My father always explained that interest for rusty metall with the cows attempt to balance out a iron-deficiency. Could be wrong though.
Found there behaviour always fascinating. They internal groom-group friendships and the one or two weakest cows they would trash up to feed them too any predator(yes, they have a social life in that way).
Not happy how dairy farming selective breeding has crippled them. If you have to inject a hormon into a creature for milking, else it gets sick, you have overstreched it to the point of crippeling.
still like farmers though and without them cows would go the way of everything wild in that juicebox that is earth.
Re: Cow Magnets
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps generic Lysol. Generic white bottle with lots of text is common on ranches.
Gross negligence at best?
Vetrinarys - those that treat cows and big animals are rare. And always on the job. As in really always.
Knew four, 2 had cancer, one had a burn out, one gave the big animals up for the pet-doctoring.
Re: Cow Magnets
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for your answer. I imagine you must control this, no? Too many magnets would probably be harmful. Also, they may be fairly larger than what cows usually eats. Do you know for a fact it's done like this?
I can confirm this is how it is done. (I've done it a few times myself) The one I used looks a bit like this one: http://www.kruuse.com/en/ecom/Hest_produktionsdyr/Vommagnete...
There was a drencher for calves i had to use.
On the instruction diagram on the side, everyone smiled, the farmer, the calf, a happy little world of forced feeding.
Re: Cow Magnets
#70I wonder if these magnets would work in spherical cows.