Cows On Treadmills Produce Clean Power For Farms 640
separsons writes "William Taylor, a farmer in Northern Ireland, recently developed the Livestock Power Mill, a treadmill for cows. Taylor uses the device to generate clean, renewable power for his farm. Cows are locked into a pen on top of a non-powered, inclined belt. The cows' walking turns the belt, which spins a gearbox to drive a generator. One cow can produce about two kilowatts of electricity, enough energy to power four milking machines. It may seem like a kooky idea, but Taylor could be onto something: According to his calculations, if the world's 1.3 billion cattle used treadmills for eight hours a day, they could provide six percent of the world's power!"
Torture? ASPCA should investigate. (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two glaring faults with this setup:
#1) The cows are 'locked in'.
#2) The treadmill is inclined.
This results in the animal walking out of 'fear' from falling. The inability of the animal to stop whenever it wants is cruel treatment. On the other hand, if it were 'elective' and the cows got a special treat (a yummy grass/feed?) then it is a different story.
I would like to see how guy would like to be locked onto a treadmill 8hrs a day, walking uphill the entire time.
I doubt the quality of the milk would be very good. Stress does not make for a nice quality or quantity of milk. (I used to work on a dairy farm.)
This is hardly new... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Food? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, increasing exercise will reduce the tastiness of both milk and meat. The meat gets leaner (the fat is the part that gives is great taste, and is why kobe is legally required to have a minimum fat content). The milk tends to have more stress byproducts, but that impact is less important.
This is the meatrix (Score:3, Interesting)
Methane (Score:4, Interesting)
Some people have joked about methane, but for those concerned about greenhouse gases, this would probably be worse than burning coal. Methane from livestock is a major source of greenhouse gases, to the point where one's personal impact on greenhouse gases is greater from giving up animal products than giving up one's car.
Re:Food? (Score:1, Interesting)
Apparently you've never watched cows grazing out in an open field.
I saw one open a box of oreos and eat it right in the aisle at Safeway. She was sitting on a scooter, so that probably changes the whole exercise dynamic, though.
No shit. I've never seen a person with an actual handicap or disability using those scooters. Every one of them had two arms and two legs and none of them were paraplegics or quadraplegics. All of them were really, horribly, disgustingly fat. I'm talking like, on the women you could not tell their gut from their tits, and the rolls of fat hanging from their shoulder blades looked like another, deformed set of tits.
I guess they don't want to walk because they might lose some of their precious calories that way. They looked like they were trying to hang onto all the calories they could get. It's cute the way each one of them wants to pretend like their lifestyle choices have absolutely nothing to do with their weight. Helpless innocent victims, they'd have you believe.
methane, more food, etc? A greenwash. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is just a distractionary greenwash.
It's kind of staggering to realize that there are almost 100 million cows in the US.
Re:Meat cows? (Score:3, Interesting)
I dunno, if I was forced to exercise 8 hours a day, I probably wouldn't be all that happy... especially if it was on a treadmill where I couldn't actually GET anywhere.
If you're gonna use happy and animals together.. you can't do it while they are penned up forcing them them to do labour all day.
That said, I don't object in to penning animals in general, after all I like their tasty flesh and white milk and cream.. and eggs.. man I love eggs.
Re:Food? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you have any citation for the difference in milk between exercised and non-exercised cows?
I'm curious, as I'm not sure what "stress byproducts" are... but it's known that among humans, exercise during lactation does not change the makeup of breast milk [nursingbaby.com], except when exercise is extremely vigorous (unlike these treadmills), and even then the impact is temporary (lasting less than 1 hour). Furthermore, there is no different in fat content, protein content, etc.
I'm not saying that cows are biologically the same as humans... I just question that exercise would affect milk production differently among different mammals when I couldn't find any evidence to support that conclusion.
+1 for the Idiocracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Woot first point for the day. As usual idealists live in a 1 dimensional universe where they again fail to see the whole cost beyound the end of their nose.
He isn't on to something, and anyone that thinks this is a great idea is a stark raving idiot.
A: Treadmills don't far well outside. More roofed covered space. Nor to treadmills grow on trees.
B: Carbon footprint for the manfacturing of said treadmills
C: Additional feed for active cows now burning more calories. More waste from more feed too
D: Energy loss in conversion to heat from friction from transmission points
E: More wiring and cabling sucking down more copper from an already stressed raw material market. Ohms.... .Ohms.....
F: Who in their right mind thinks: taking solar energy and water and converting it into biomass
Then using millions of tons of fossil fuels to build machinery to develop and harvest biomass.
Feed said biomass to another animal
To use millions of tons of fossil fuels in manufacturing a kinetic engery transfomation device (treadmill)
To then power a machine to generate a fraction of the energy "THE SUN PUT OUT IN THE FIRST PLACE!?
Jebus Rice we are getting shit-eating stupid pretty damn fast when people think "Hey they're on to something..."
Narrow minded morons never looking past their own nose on what real costs are.
Source article and methane reduction (Score:3, Interesting)
According to the source article I read, the treadmill seems to help cows reduce methane production. The idea is that cows that don't move around are more gassy than cows that move around.
Re:Food? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's anecdotal based on a dairy owning friend who likes to complain about the activists who want the cows to be free range, and the number of complaints about milk quality he gets when he does. He can't win.
Livestock eat 6 times more food than they provide (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really, because bread and vegetables are harder to digest than meat
What does ease of digestion have to do with how much food makes it to you? Further: http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/aug97/livestock.hrs.html [cornell.edu]: "Each year an estimated 41 million tons of plant protein is fed to U.S. livestock to produce an estimated 7 million tons of animal protein for human consumption."
So, a 5.8:1 ratio.
Re:Food? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cows are lazy, but also very curious.
I was bicycling past a herd of cattle, and they all looked up and stared at me. They started wandering towards the road I was at, following me, but soon broke from "mosey" into full-out "walk." I sped up, and so did the cows - they were leaping, like giant, bloated, mooing rabbits, fully keeping pace with my bicycle.
Granted, I never had cancer, but I'd like to think I bicycle faster than cows. They were almost doing 20 miles an hour.
They're evil, too. My grandfather was a farmer back in the day. One day working in the fields, a door-to-door salesman drove up, through the field, to try to hawk something to him. My grandfather was annoyed, naturally, but the cows discovered his car and licked all the chrome off.
Re:Food? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, so my mother who was in end stage cancer and unable to walk more than a dozen yards doesn't qualify? She had two arms and two legs.
I agree that a fair number of the people using them might look like they would benefit from exercise but that doesn't mean that I have any right to judge whether or not they use a scooter. Ditto with the handicap cards. I'm not qualified to decide if they're handicapped or not so I don't bother worrying about it.
Anytime a generalization is made, an obvious generalization, inevitably somebody pipes up with "but X is an exception" and seriously believes they have made a useful point. That's what you've done. It's like you seriously believe one should discard the fact that it's mostly fatties who use those scooters merely because you know one person who used them for another reason. You do realize that saying "I have never seen this" is not remotely the same thing as saying "this does not exist anywhere", right? This can't be a hard thing to understand unless of course your emotions about your mother's condition are overriding your reasoning. No offense, but that is your problem. Ever heard of the concept of the exceptions proving the rule? I'm sure you have and are choosing to ignore it.
Fact is, obesity is a real problem in America and elsewhere and has a great deal of impact on whether mobility devices like scooters are used. Fact is, unlike cancer patients, most fatties do have control over their condition and could work to change it. The reason they don't is that they want to blame genetics, being "big-boned", etc. rather than face the fact that they are responsible for their condition. Fact is, avodiing physical activity like walking (more like waddling in their case) is a great way to remain fat. Fact is, if you burn more calories than you eat you will lose weight -- you'd have to disprove some very fundamental laws of physics to argue otherwise. Fatties need to either consume fewer calories or burn more calories, or both, and their refusal to do so means they are choosing to be fatties. Choosing something means the person is not helpless but is actively making a lifestyle choice.
It's mysterious to me why fatties allow their condition to get so bad in the first place. They weren't born obese. It took time to happen. They became 10 pounds overweight and didn't do anything about it. Then they became 20 pounds overweight and still didn't see the writing on the wall. Then 30, then 50, etc. At any point along this progression, they could have said "hey, this is going to keep getting worse if I keep doing the same thing, but if I do something right now I can start reversing the damage before it progresses further." Yet they don't, because that would mean taking responsibility for their choices and they'd rather make excuses. Think about it this way -- if you cannot even take control over your own body because you don't believe it's worthwhile to care about yourself enough to do so, how can anyone argue with you? Why should they be concerned about you?
Oh and incidentally, if you've ever seen cancer patients you'd know it's quite easy to distinguish them from the morbidly obese. Cancer tends to make someone waste away, not become fat. If they are on chemeotherapy, the fact that this makes their hair fall out is also a dead giveaway. It just isn't difficult to tell the difference. That isn't the same as "judging" anything unless seeing a spade and calling it a spade is your idea of being judgmental. There is no criteria for "am I qualified?" when it comes to a personal opinion so there's no good reason for you to mention that. If I were an elected official who wanted to start taking away handicap cards and access to things like scooters, then and only then would you have a case for whether I need to be qualified to make medical assessments. Nice red herring there.
Re:Torture? ASPCA should investigate. (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm sure they are very happy wherever they don't have to swat flies. And I agree treating any animal as a human, is just stupid. However an animal is an animal, weather dog, cat, cow, or elephant.
However putting an animal on a treadmill, and then walking away is just wrong.
@COMON$ Would you put your yellow lab on a treadmill for the day so you could get down your electricity bill? Just tie him to the treadmill, and you go to work. He'd be getting the same amount of exercise as playing outside all day, so might as well make it useful?
I find people justify things very selectively. @COMON$ I love animals, etc etc. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you won't eat your dog after he passes away, but its ok to eat cows. Its ok to put a cow on a treadmill to benefit me, but its not ok to put my yellow lab on a treadmill to benefit me, because I say so....and i like the yellow lab...
I find all these arguments are all just bullshit. Either all animals are equal, in which case throw that lab of your on a treadmill if there's nothing wrong with it.
There's something wrong with it, I assure you.
Re:Food? (Score:5, Interesting)
>> Then we diesel truck the manure off and bury it in a landfill.
Y'all ain't from around here, are ya?
I was about to say, I pay $2 to $4 a bag for that stuff to put on my blueberries, blackberries, etc. Better yet: use human waste for lawns, fields and golf courses.
We cleared off 1/4 acre of wood (which was taken to the lumber mill and turned into railroad ties) and in order to get grass to grow in the poor soil, we hauled in a tandem load (about 11 cubic yards or about 9-10 cubic meters) of "sterilized compost" from the waste treatment plant. This means grass clippings, leaves and human poo, sterilized and composted, all "trash" that the county has to deal with. It costs $110, delivered, and we spread by hand. Best. Lawn. Ever. And no, it doesn't smell like poo, just a little like ammonia (like all compost) for a couple of days.
I'm a conservative who is a conservationist (ie: I have no use for environmentalists as I want to USE the resources we protect) and this is the right way to recycle and reuse, as it gives great results, cheaper, and creates less landfill, which is where it would have gone if I didn't spread it on the lawn. AND it allowed the waste plant to make a profit on something they normally would have to pay to dispose of.