I’ve had this great money-making idea. As a concept, it is similar to the Eglu, a kind of spacecraft for chickens – the chicken-coop that allows you to cuddle up and get all eco-friendly without too much farmyard muck, the kind of thing that makes Islington Guardianistas feel good about themselves.
In that vein I have invented an eco-friendly, carbon-neutral lawnmower. It uses no fuel whatsoever. No petrol, no electricity, not even batteries. Indeed, the killer app is that the grass itself is used to fuel the motors, and the byproducts are spread directly on the just-cut grass as a kind of fertilizer. Amazing!
Even better, you don’t even have to push it along. Place the EcoMo™ over the patch of grass to be cut, and it does the rest. Just sit back, relax, read the Weekend Guardian colour supplement, and bathe in your own right-on smugness. When the patch is cut – time varies between a few minutes and a couple of hours – move the EcoMo™ to the next patch.
Quality? Matchless. The EcoMo™ produces a very fine, even cut, without any bald patches, or stalks left uncut.
Let me show you the prototype.
This model is the 4-GPP (guinea-pig-power) version. As you see, the frame contains four (4) guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus). You can vary the number of guinea pigs, of course, to speed up (or reduce) the rate of cut. And guinea pigs sh-t like machine guns, fertilizing the lawn as you go.
Here’s a close-up of the machine’s interior:
and a portrait of one of the eco-motors in action:
The only drawback I can see so far is that the EcoMo™ takes a little longer to cut the average lawn than a regular lawnmower – but that’s OK if you have a small lawn, and/or you’re in it to save the planet rather than have the instant gratification of a perfect lawn. And if you have a big lawn, buy a goat. Or a horse.
All I need now is to find someone to develop the prototype EcoMo™ into a moulded-plastic shell in a variety of trendy colours, and set up a website that’ll supply the EcoMo™ complete with loveable guinea pigs, and then sit back and watch the money roll in. Perhaps Omlet would be interested?
‘Only drawback’?
What about the guinea pig shit all over your feet when you stagger outside with your cup of English Breakfast to greet the new morn?
Sounds like a lot of drawbacks to me.
Richard – it’s quite pellety (though if I have to tread in anything I marginally prefer rabbit, which I think mow faster than guinea pigs, and have a longer operating life).
Henry – I look forward to seeing you on Dragon’s Den.
Don’t try it with rabbits or mice—from my own experience they would (respectively) burrow under or sqeeze through a hole somewhere. Guinea pigs are the type example for your prototype.
I have to agree, though, that the byproduct needs more thought—even though conveniently pellety, it isn’t that great to sit on or stand in with your bare feet. And if you can’t have bare feet in your own garden, where can you have them? Up on your desk in the office? ;-)
The burrowing is just a design detail. It can be easily solved by having chicken wire on the bottom of the run, for which of course (the deluxe version) Henry can charge another £50.
Ah, well, here is another killer business idea. People won’t want to buy an EcoMo™ without SloMo™, my patent earthworm attractant, which will encourage worms to drag the pelleted refuse underground.
Genius, but not completely carbon-neutral though. Surely the little mowers would also periodically release small bursts of methane? (This is, of course, speculation. I don’t know if guinea pigs fart and a quick Pubmed search threw up no relevant publications on the topic).
Actually Henry, what you want to do is train the little blighters to crap into a container, then you can render the waste into fuel that powers an engine to automatically move the EcoMo around.
Do it right, and the cage doesn’t move until they’ve eaten enough grass to power the engine. Brilliant.
Thanks for all these useful (and free) development tips.
I’m hoping that the next prototype of the EcoMo™ will run on little wheels which will be sensitive enough to allow the frame as a whole to respond to the movements of the guinea pigs themselves. That way the guinea pigs will move the machine quite naturally to new patches of grass in a kind of random-walk, self-organized, fractal stylee, kind of thing, sort of, possibly (look, I’m a palaeontologist, ok?). This has two benefits. First, the machine will find the optimum cut rate and pattern all by itself. Second, it will minimize user input (which will be there, of course, to stop the machine straying into the flower border/pod/veg patch/trees) and even out the deposition of … er … waste products.
I don’t think one could turn the waste products directly into energy unless you had a million-quid anaerobic digester and at least several (million) more guinea pigs. But the excess waste is great on the compost heap.
Postscript – my wife has come in and has looked over my shoulder at this blog. She suggests that we should find a way to harness the incredible power of our hamster. Just hook up his wheel to a dynamo and well, you can work out the rest.
Might be some prior art in that, Henry:
Fourth para ( original )
maybe we should go into this together … :)
Over in Seattle, there’s a debate about the suitability of pygmy goats for lawn mowing. My favorite quote from the article: “Conlin’s office researched health issues and said the disease risk is low. Some goats, however, smell bad.” Surely a small price to pay for not having to mow a big lawn? I’m thinking the Escalade of EcoMos…
I’ve seen similar devices here, but with triangular frames (less wire) and rabbits (like hamsters, edible, but also beyond the ranges of the Andes).
Hello Henry, there is a good post about guinea-pigs here, at Light Reading. (Blog of a friend.) Note the last part.
Thanks Maxine – I, too, liked the story of the blackboard eraser. Guinea-pigs are so placid when you hold them that they could easily be mistaken for an eraser. One could always use them to clean the car, or the windows…