With smarphones, tablets and other devices tracking every move we make, the digital world is surely a reality that has snuck upon us. In fact it has been projected by Gartner that we could soon have 25 billion devices connected to IoT within the next decade.
This progress can be witnessed throughout all industries; even the field of ‘agritech’ has benefited. Cattle management for dairy and their security needs rely heavily on IoT. Let’s take a look at the few technologies that propel this movement forward in cow management.
Cattle Movement
Monitoring cattle movement to combat theft and locating their position was deemed a necessity by dairy farmers. Latest IoT innovations have brought forward a solution. BT, a company in UK, has incorporated a technology that can pinpoint the location of cattle and where are roaming on the go. The technology can work on any connected device, including your mobile, and helps you gauge the location of your cattle on the go.
Fertility
Cows have a limited time period in which they are fertile. This period can be as little as 8–9 hours a month. IoTSense detects the fertility period for cattle, and ensures that this window of fertility is accounted for and made use of. This information is collected through sensors in a 1,000-meter range. These sensors conflate together to form a reading that is almost concrete when it comes to deciding the fertility period. With information regarding the fertility period, farmers can efficiently manage their cattle.
Behavior
A device that follows the framework of IoT has been developed to track the activity of cows through the day. It detects all anomalies in their eating and grazing patterns and sends the information to farmers, information that they can use to control their herds. Farmers can access this data via smartphone, and act quickly to address any issues that the cattle might be facing. Since most livestock farmers suffer from downtime whenever the cattle faces problem regarding their lactation and other issues, it is really helpful for them to locate the problem in its infancy. This way around they can manage their cattle in a more authentic manner.
Lactation
An upstate dairy farm in New York makes use of Astronaut robots to milk more than thousand cows. The robots are known to increase the production of cows, since they have this built-in capability to allow cows to choose the time they would like to be milked. They also gather behavioral data and study it to detect when the cows would or could produce more milk. Lactation is an important part of revenue generation for livestock farmers, and thus the reduction of any human errors in this process can directly influence the revenue coming in from the cattle.
