These videos of robotic cow milking machines, feed mixers and distributers and pushers, and manure roombas are amazing!

Cows like to push and play with their food to get to the yummy grain bits, so the feed robot pushes the food back so they can eat it all.

And the Poopoombas had to learn to be more aggressive about pushing cows out of the way and not stopping every time they bumped or got kicked, because otherwise the cows would assign them the lowest status in the pecking order, and they could only cower in the corner.

Here are the videos from the article and some more:

The milking process of the Lely Astronaut A5 - EN:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-zYshsAg1E

Takes Dairy Farm Tour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZY8TbBoDd0

Zeta - how it works - EN - NL subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17TA-lI_oqQ

Zeta - Vision film - EN - NL subtitles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nRaj16tPLc

Their web site has a pretty cool "page not found" error page too:

https://www.lely.com/moo

Now dairy farms can use two different kinds of AI together! ;) They could develop an insemination module to go with their calving module.

https://www.lely.com/solutions/latest-innovations/zeta/ai-ca...

I wonder if you can rent swarms of these and dispatch them to anywhere you need them:

https://www.lely.com/solutions/manure/discovery-collector/

Or if you can use them in reverse, loading them up them dumping shit wherever you wanted to, like a giant Logo Turdle, in the name of art and science.

These machines have been around for a while. There are at least nine companies selling them.[1] This started in Australia and New Zealand, which don't have much cheap labor.

There's a competing approach - robotic rotary milking.[2] Rotary milkers (giant turntables with cows on them) have been around for decades, and are becoming more automated, down from four people to one.

All this stuff works fine. So there's a huge milk glut.

[1] https://roboticsbiz.com/top-9-best-robotic-milking-machines/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxhE53G3CUM

It's cool that this allows the cows to be milked whenever they feel like it. I'd imagine the autonomy actually does improve the cow's quality of life. Also neat that they learned to game the feeding robot. It reminds me of the image recognition experiments they do with birds.

I don't know the current state of readiness for the milking robots, but 10 years ago it was a nightmare. When a cow got blocked in the robot, the farmer get notify and stops what he is doing to check the cow and the robot. With the free access to the milking robot 24/7 it means that as a farmer you can get your phone ringing to free a cow stuck in the robot at 3 am, or when you are 20 miles away in a field. This level of stress caused many farmers to sell their milking robot and come back to two milking sessions a day, typically 6 am and 6 pm.

China famously now has "dark factories" where everything is automated, so lighting is not needed.

Guess this means we're about to have "dark dairies" where cows can be kept chained up in perpetual darkness, with robots doing the absolute minimum required to keep them alive, pregnant and producing milk.

I know this is not a particularly pleasant thought, but I'd like to hear counterarguments about why this wouldn't happen, since to me it seems market pressures will otherwise drive dairies in this direction.

(For what it's worth, I'm not a vegan, but a visit to a regular human-run dairy sufficiently confident in its practices to conduct tours for the public was almost enough to put me off dairy products for good.)