Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile in German politics: "We don't need 5G on every cow facility" [1].

Turns out, modern agriculture needs good mobile connectivity wherever cows are being held...

Politics aside, what I don't get is why they don't go and raise temporary electric fences with gates - that's how cows are held in alpine regions. And a side note, if you go on a hike in alpine regions in Germany, please close the gates after you pass through so that the cows don't escape.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/anja-karliczek-br...

View on HN

Differential GPS is already a cornerstone of precision farming, because on a very lond field harvesting a 2cm border stripe (or not) implies substantially more yield (or not).

Whether each cow needs 5G we can debate - but usually once a service exists, it generates novel ideas that use the service. It's called "innovation", and I invite politicians unfamiliar with the subject (German or otherwise) to attend my lecture with the same title.

I remember reading that a cow health monitoring in the Netherlands would generate about 20 GB of data daily (location, temperature, how many hours walking vs lying). So 5G makes sense in some agricultural setups.

20gb of data per day on cow telemetry sounds crazy. even 2 id be like what are you doing...

I guess we would just set up a cow fence.

These GPS trackers help find cattle, possibly making rescue efforts faster and thus cheaper, but they do not prevent them falling into that river in the first place. A fence does.

I know, this is the classical "NASA builds a 1 million dollar Space pen, Russians use pencil" story - but sometimes, high tech is not necessary to solve problems that have been solved for centuries.

Doesn't mean we don't need better infrastructure. Just that we should avoid overcomplicating things.

If you read the article, you'll find that in fact the collars do prevent them from moving toward the river using sound, vibration, and shocks.

> they do not prevent them falling into that river in the first place

The article explains pretty well how the devices prevent cows from falling into the river:

> Solar-powered GPS devices emit a high-pitched sound as the animal moves through a boundary zone towards the water, with a mild electric pulse delivered if it fails to turn around.

So the cow learns there is a 'good zone' or a 'bad zone' to be in. And how does the cow - which now may be panicking - know it does not exit the 'bad zone' by, let's say, jumping into the river?

Applying human intelligence to bovines may be misguided.

They're not particularly dumb animals (similar to the average dog), generally they do get the idea pretty quickly. (There is a gradient of warning as they approach the edge of the zone, so it's not just suddenly a big shock)

I'd compare their intelligence to cats, in that a dog uses its intelligence to please its owner, and a cat uses its intelligence to do whatever it pleases. :-)

Someone below linked to a company providing this technology and it seems we do now have remote control cows (no panicking that I can see):

https://www.instagram.com/halterhq/reel/C_hq8_iSnCH/

I ... honestly don't know if I should be impressed or horrified. Essentially, they have become cyborgs. Mootrons?

I stand corrected either way.

[shrug]

Invisible Fence (https://www.invisiblefence.com/) has been a thing at least since the early 2000's when we had one for our dog.

It's inarguably smart, but... freaking dystopian.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com