Cow Magnets | Hacker News Reader

Cow Magnets

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119 pointscorndoge71 comments

Grew 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 the earlier days when renovation was not set in system they used to bury their trash (what else could they do really).

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.

Cows 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 into the cow while talking to farm. Finishes up and goes to disconnect the bottle from the IV, looks at it, turns to the farmer and says, "I think I just bought your cow." It wasn't calcium replacement, it was Lysol that he had just dumped a liter of into the cow!

The cow lived, barely seemed to notice.

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!

Why did he have Lysol in an IV though?! Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow

It's a good question that I don't know the answer to. This happened decades ago and is third hand at this point, so take it with a grain of salt (but check that it's actually salt first, and not, you know, Lysol).

Wondering the same thing. How would lysol end up in an IV?

I assume it's a fill your own bag solution not a sterile bag that said medical grade lysol.

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?

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.

Maybe your mother was the first one to discover cow placebo effects :)

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 the chances of penetrating the reticulum. Of course, the best preventive measure is keeping feed bunks, pastures, cow lots, etc., free of potentially hazardous objects.

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 to detect until you are literally standing over it.

Drive around with a generator and an electromagnet?

Most of the stuff is not just lying on the surface; it's partly buried or covered. I've gone to cut down tree branches and found sections of barbed wire 6 feet off the ground because it rose as the tree grew and snapped off when it was pulled too taut.

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.

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.

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 the robot is optimistic.

From the tiny amout of reading I've done cows eat hardware - nails, screws, and bits of wire that are accidentally left in feed troughs, or bits of wire from tires that are left in fields for some feed product.

Many cases of hardware disease would be a oided if there was some concentration on keeping those safe for cattle.

But maybe I'm guilty of armchair farming.

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.

    ...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 to chew the cud?

Essentially what I'm envisaging is an outdoor Roomba that just gets left to do its own thing until it needs human assistance. Arable farming - at least at the larger end of the scale - is getting pretty comfortable with drone equipment, with driverless combine harvesters guided by GPS and similar things; livestock farmers are not going to be averse to it either (not least because farmers, in my experience, really dig flashy toys! :) ).

It really is simpler, easier and cheaper to give the cows these magnet boluses.

- The magnets cost less than a dollar each once you're buying a couple of hundred. You can outfit a herd of probably 4-500 animals for the replacement cost of one cow.

- It takes less than a minute to administer each one

- I have never seen one passed into dung or regurgitated into the feed/bedding areas

A drone could perhaps scout a field, but it's challenging terrain: - You are looking for metal from the size of a paperclip up to the size of a large pack of gum across hundreds of acres of land

- You are searching in tangled grass (or other forage crop)

- How will the drone collect the items? Do you want a farm worker to come and collect each piece? They can be very hard to see.

As someone who has experience in this area (and likes his fancy tech) I honestly believe that the current tiered state is quite effective:

1. Metal detectors in foraging machinery. This stops and reverses the field machinery whenever it picks up something. You hop out of the tractor and fetch out the offending article. This gets the larger items

2. Magnets in feeder machines. This is one hell of a magnet that sits somewhere in the machine used to dispense feed. It picks up smaller items that may have bypasses the field kit. It once took me 5 minutes to get a screwdriver unstuck when installing one of these.

3. Magnets in cows. The items from the linked article.

EDIT: The ones I have seen are caged magnets which trap any metal inside a plastic cage, further removing pointed bits. Image search for "bovine caged magnet" shows different types.

Fortunately this is knowable because sticking magnets in cows is something that we've done for many, many years. So we know what it costs and how effective it is.

Whereas a robot to solve the problem doesn't yet exist. And the important bit here is to realize what the word "solve" means here.

I'm not saying a workable solution will never exist, but in order to be as effective it would need to be orders of magnitude better at its job than a roomba is at its job. And what the roomba does isn't very hard to begin with. You would have to cover a very large area of sometimes pretty rough terrain every N days, and you would need to have a very high success rate at both detection and removal for the solution to be able to compete with the established practices.

To understand the problem I can only recommend spending some time on a farm where they keep grazing cattle.

At $2 - $5 per magnet, (as listed on that website, you could probably get them cheaper if you're outfitting a herd of 2000+) you'd have to cut a lot of corners to build something that can traverse a populated pasture and pick up tiny bits of metal and still come out as an economical choice.

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 there of an outdoor one working. And yes, I am aware that I can buy some rather nice autonomous lawn mowers for suburban gardens but again they rely on a landscape designed for them.

Even "pancake flat" states aren't that flat! (Kansas, specifically)

The cows get the bumpy fields, the tractors get the flat ones.

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 <st>herd immunity</st> 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.

I think it's a good analog if he's suggesting that all the cows with magnets will eat up all the metal leaving little for the ones that do not have magnets. No idea if that's how it works though.

Now do the math for the drones required to sweep the land for 200 cows, say, once a month.

A spare wheel probably costs as much as a magnet.

And don't forget that the metal being ingested isn't just sitting on the surface of the grass. In many cases, it's probably buried in the first 2 or 3 cm of topsoil and being turned up as the cattle uproot the grass. Is your drone going to handle this? Is it really handling all this at a price of sub-$20 per head over 10 years? I'd have to see it to believe it.

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.

That's great until a cow eats your drone. Then you'll need a _really_ big magnet.

This probably isn't economically feasible yet, but I'm sure we'll see something like this in the next decade or two. And for that matter, such a drone could be cutting the grass or doing other similar jobs.

I know, I'll use a drone! Now the cows are eating drone parts too!

I should laugh at this, but having had horses demolish the ($125 replacement cost) seat on my ATV because I was dumb enough to leave it in the pasture overnight, it hits a bit too close to home.

I've yet to encounter an animal that wasn't destructive when it got bored! Maybe goldfish?

Perhaps we can build a drone that also self-assembles a protective carapace of grass around itself while it browses around for metal.

Alternatively, it could maybe shout "GO AWAY COWS" at random intervals.

And all this is still cheaper than buying magnets!

If you build the drone out of magnets, you can fall back to the original plan when it inevitably breaks down!

Now you're thinking with por- ... I mean... magnets!

Some of the debris is intentional, like barb wire which those magnets accumulate a fair amount of.

Who else was expecting an article on a new way to collect cows into one spot?

There are a couple of solutions taking the standard bolus and turning it into a connected pH sensor to monitor cattle health:

https://connect.innovateuk.org/documents/3285671/6079410/Sma...

http://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/Presentation/ConnectedDev...

http://www.wellcow.co.uk

http://www.ecow.co.uk

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.

In the 19th Centrury, everal experiments on human digestion were conducted on someone with a gunshot wound that left a fistula providing access to the stomach, somewhat like those cannula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beaumont#Experiments_w...

My girlfriend's sister is a grad student in the dairy nutrition program at the nearby university, and she gave me a tour of the farm where I saw a few cows with these. Like the article says, the device allows direct access to one of the cow's stomachs essentially. This lets the researchers take more direct samples of the stomach contents when testing different kinds of feed.

As a kid, we went on a field trip to a place that had a cannulated cow and they let us put a (gloved) hand in to feel what it was like.

...I forget if I actually did it, I remember it being warm and bumpy, but I might also be projecting memories of what the other kids said.

They had some of these at the University of Maryland at College Park when I was an Undergad.

My parents are vets (in Norway). The magnets I remember them using about 30 years ago were about 10cm long rods with a elongated plastic cage around them -- to offset the sharp ands of nails etc to protect the tissue.

There was a lot of trouble around the Buckyball magnets a few years ago, with the U.S. CPSC saying that they were unsafe for children because if a child swallowed two, they might attract one another from different locations within the child's digestive system and cause injury. (The manufacturer of Buckyballs was apparently very upset about the outcome.) It's interesting to think that swallowing magnets was seen as a serious threat to human digestive systems, but here is used to protect cows' digestive systems.

Is the difference just in the cows' anatomy and the size of the magnet, so that this magnet is guaranteed to stay in the first stomach and not go any further, while human anatomy doesn't work that way?

It seems like having cows swallow very small magnets (that can advance beyond the first stomach) would also tend to injure them, because those magnets could attract metal objects from one part of the digestive system toward another, as the CPSC feared with the Buckyballs.

The cow are gets a single capsule (either a single alnico magnet or a plastic capsule with smaller ferrite magnets in it, but the same size) about the size of your thumb. It never passes from the first chamber.

The Buckyball magnets are rare earth and much stronger than cow magnets. A kid who swallowed one might follow it up with another, or some bit of metal, after the first magnet entered the intestinal track and those two might snap together and cause damage.

I think the problem is there whether it is a buckyball magnet or a stack of discs for some craft or hobby. Kids love those kinds of things. You just need to watch them like hawks and be careful what you leave laying around.

Sorry, but I had to laugh about this a little. Depending on where you grew up (and perhaps when), this article may or may not be news.

Not that it isn't an interesting treatment idea the first time you see it.

What about non-magnetic metal debris?

Not very common on a farm, nails and wire are always steel. Non-ferrous metals wouldn't be strong enough.

Remember my dad mentioned these from time to time.

Also I heard that local slaughterhouse staff were not allowed to tell when there was an emergency job as otherwise everyone would gather to see what this cow had eaten. (As mentioned nails and screws were common but i heard about one of them, not ours, eating a bunch of huge galvanized bolts. Investigation found out they were left behind by high voltage powerline technicians I think.)

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14590-and-on-that-far...

Has this been taken into account regarding the magnetically aligned cow theory?

What's the procedure to "deliver" the magnet? Surgery? Sedation?

It's a sort of plastic plunger. You load the caged magnet into the plunger and stick it in the back of the cows mouth. Press the plunger and the cow swallows it.

Kind of like giving your pet a tablet, but bigger.

Let the cow eat it, like it would the other things the magnet is supposed to protect against.

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?

For scale: http://media-channel.nationalgeographic.com/media/uploads/ph...

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.

One marwel super-hero has similar magnets inside him. Cowmen or something.

Used 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.

I wonder if these magnets would work in spherical cows.

Does this mean I can stick things like refrigerator magnets to cows?

This makes me sad.

Why? It seems to prevent a really bad condition.

Well. On one hand, it does. But on the other... maybe we should improve the conditions.

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