Cow

This article again covers a topic related to my wife’s family farm, but this time, instead of exporting milking data to Grafana, I will detail my usage of Michael Stapelberg’s amazing gokrazy project, which made it possible to reliably develop Go software to control fences around the farm. Fences and Cows 🐄 The farm is distributed on 2 sites, and on each site there are rather long electric fences, in which the cows happily pasture during the day (and for the heifer’s fence, also during the night). To prevent the cows from escaping the fences and e.g. eat our neighbour’s grass (which is always greener, as we all know), the fences are electrified ⚡️ with high voltage (6000V) impulsions every second. ...

Alongside my work as a System Engineer (with a focus on Kubernetes) at PostFinance, I’m married to a farmer in Switzerland, and live with her and her family on the family farm. This is quite different from my daily work, and I sometimes have the opportunity to help by, for example, feeding calves during milking, using my skills to install surveillance cameras, deploying a long-distance WiFi network across the farm, or modernizing the milking monitoring. It’s this latter point that I’m detailing today (without all the technical details, which are covered in the README of the open-source project I’ve created for this purpose). ...