Cow&Co

A cow as a methane-powered self-sufficient milking machine: Speculative approach to livestock farming

Long Description

(Project by Anastasia Eggers and Ottonie von Roeder)

Food production has a massive impact on our environment. We transform natural habitat into land for food and, according to research, the livestock farming causes more greenhouse gases than all the direct emissions from the entire transportation sector.

One cow produces about 200 liters of methane gas per day. Worldwide there are about 1.5 billion cows. We want to visualise an alternative way of how to use the 300 billion liters of methane produced daily to start a discussion on our food production and consumption and the emissions generated by it.

Cow&Co is an exemplary project that tells a story about how it could be possible to create a closed-circle economy around just one cow. Methane gas collected from the cow’s rumen is used as a fuel to power a milking robot. The cow can move independently in green spaces of a city and use an online service in order to connect to their customers.

Cow&Co is not a direct solution, but a speculative concept that suggests a radical approach of bringing dairy production to the city. The outcome of the project will be a fusion of documentary and speculative fiction that is talking about placing the production closer to the city dwellers to trigger rethinking the value of milk products and our consumption patterns. The aim of it is to raise awareness about the greenhouse gas emissions of the farming industry, while critically talking about the role of the farm animal in the society and imagining the future of livestock farming.