ABSTRACT
Down on the Dutch polders there is a farm where the cows are untouched by human hand. The cows come in from the lush pastureland of what has been for centuries one of Europe’s great dairy regions, they enter their ‘milking parlour’—a building more like a modern car factory than the rustic shippon of yore-machines, whirr, buzz and click, food drops into troughs in front of the cows’ noses, mechanical hands and hoses wash the cows’ udders and robot arms slap milking-machine cups onto the teats of each animal. Milking completed, in about half the time it used to take Gelda with her wooden pail, milking stool and practised hands to extract about a third as much milk-the details of the whole operation are recorded on the farm’s comprehensive computer system. Not only are all the mechanical actions of the robotic cow herding system controlled by the computer, but so too are the details of each cow that passes through the system: her daily milk yield, food intake, weight gain or loss and other details that are essential to the precision husbandry that is rapidly replacing the picturesque but unprofitable farming beloved of the folklorists.
