Machine vision down on the farm

Is nothing sacred? I have no problem with machine vision asparagus graders or robot weeding machines, but now they’re making milkmaids redundant! No longer will our bucolic meadows be filled with fair maidens striding through the long, damp grass, buckets of warm milk fresh from the cow swinging from the yoke across their shoulders. No longer will we dream of the sweet young woman squatting down on her three-legged stool beside the bovine beast. Oh no, those dreams are now history for some idiot with a laser and a robot has rendered such rural idylls obsolete.

OK, it’s been a long time since farming looked like that, if indeed it ever did (perhaps I read too much Thomas Hardy while at school,) but robots in the milking parlor? Whatever will they think of next?

Well actually it’s quite an interesting idea – watch this video from the UK-based IET for details – and given the way young people are migrating from countryside to the cities, it might be the only way agricultural production can continue. No word on how the cows feel about it, although towards the end of the video there is reference to “lazy cows” – seems a rather pejorative term to me, but there you are.

The poor milkmaid never quite achieved the same fantasy status as the Frenchmaid, but her passing will be mourned nevertheless.