AgriRover Brings Mars Rover Technology To the Farm 41
Zothecula writes "We tend to think of livestock farmers as 'one man and his dog,' but if AgResearch of New Zealand has anything to say, that pair may have to move over to include a robot. A team led by Dr. Andrew Manderson is developing AgriRover, an agricultural robot inspired by NASA's Mars rovers. It's a proof-of-concept prototype designed to show how robots can make life easier and more productive for livestock farmers."
My image. (Score:3, Informative)
"We tend to think of livestock farmers as 'one man and his dog,'..
No, I think of them just locking the animals in huge pens, force feeding them corn, pumping them up with anti-biotics and other drugs so that they can digest food that they didn't evolve to eat ( they supposed to eat grass and are incapable of digesting corn without much pharmaceutical help), live in their own shit and piss, and then slaughtered. And I won't get into the welf...tax subsidies they get ...
I don't know who they're talking about in the article - non-US farms?
Re:My image. (Score:4, Informative)
Anti-biotics don't "pump cattle up"
Yes they do:
The growth-promotic effects of antibiotics are undisputed, but the collateral and long-term effect are a cause for a heated debate and banning in the European Union in 2005 [kenyon.edu]
Re:Why livestock? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a variant of no-till called pasture cropping [pasturecropping.com] which solves some of those issues by combining livestock with row crops. The field is grazed down once, then again a few days later, before the grass has recovered. This double-punch puts the grass in a semi-dormant state, so you can plant directly into the sod. As your row crops sprout, they'll have head start on the pasture plants, eventually shading them out. (They'll still keep growing, just very slowly.) After harvest, you can graze again or mow for hay, and the pasture will recover normally.
As for livestock, robots wouldn't be my first choice either. FTFA:
A livestock paddock, for example, may look uniform, but under the grass there’s a great deal of variability of soil and conditions. Levels of potassium, sulfur, and acidity can be very different even within a single square meter. The main reason is that livestock don’t pee or poop in anything like a uniform pattern
A simple solution to this is raising complementary species in managed intensive rotational grazing [wikipedia.org] as described by "Omnivore's Dilemma" author Michael Pollan in this video (10min). [youtube.com] In a nutshell: the pasture is divided into paddocks which are grazed intensively for a day or two, then rested for a few weeks. The trick is to bring poultry into the same paddock a few days after the ruminants. Chickens (for example) will go after the cow patties and kick them apart to get at the maggots inside, and in doing so, they spread the manure very effectively while also keeping the fly population down. There's no need for an expensive robot to do this job when you can have another livestock species (ie: another revenue stream) do it for free.