This is taking teating, er, I mean tweeting to a whole new level. Not only are dairy farmers getting social but so are dairy cows. From our World Dairy Diary site:
Wondering what your cows are thinking? Well, a group of Candain Holsteins is telling the world through Twitter, exactly what they are mooing about. Called “The Teat Tweet“, the project comes from the University of Waterloo’s critical media lab. You can visit this website to follow all 12 Holsteins on Twitter.
“As far as we know they’re the only cows tweeting,” said former LaSalle and Windsor resident Marcel O’Gorman who is behind the University of Waterloo’s critical media lab project.
The tweeting cows are poking fun at the popular Twitter network and are meant to push people to think about where their food comes from and the high-tech nature of farming.
“Hey human, I just pumped out 9.3 kg for your pleasure. Show me some love,” says a recent tweet of dairy cow Attention Please referring to her milk output.
It’s obviously impossible for the hoofed animals to tweet without the aid of a computer but by approaching the robotic milker, the cows do trigger a tweet. The Holstein cows have radio frequency ID tags which tell the computer whether the cow is ready for milking and the computer records how much, how fast and even which teat pumped out milk the fastest.