Mark Hotton of the Southland Times writes about the idea, dreamt up by a think tank which explores the relationship between new media and ‘the human condition’, to connect some cows to twitter, allowing their farmer to keep track of their production.
The tweets, which are enabled by the cows’ use of robotic milking technology, also contain the occasional pithy remark and piece of poetry.
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“Those setting up the system realised Mr Vandenberg had less contact with his cows because of the robotic milking and wanted to develop a mobile way for him to monitor how the cows were doing.
“Each of the 12 cows was photographed, had Twitter profiles created, and a “voice” developed. Various tweets were created that led to live and continous twitter feed that announces each cow’s milk output or feed eaten, as well as the occasional line of poetry from Virgil.
“Southland dairy farmer Bill Overgaauw, who has a similar robotic milking system, was bemused by the idea because he had not heard of Twitter.”