Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
The essence of the idea is to create a cattle tracking device that will be integrated into an ear tag, and to provide valuable insights and data-based notifications to producers. The use of ear tags is a common standard in the cattle industry to keep track of animal's identification to monitor health, breeding, feeding, and overall performance. In pasture-based operations (typical for small and midsize beef farms), the ear tags are usually just a number. The number corresponds to documented information such as which year the cow was born, which number the animal was in the births of that year, if male or female (right ear/left ear methodology), and so on. Often, ear tags are impregnated with insecticides to reduce face flies and other annoying parasites.The proposed project will take the use of a basic ear tag much further by integrating a tracking device into the ear tag. This will allow the producer to monitor the animal's movement. Why is this beneficial? First, it is important to understand that cattle are "herd" animals, meaning that they generally stay together as they eat, drink, and sleep. When an animal leaves the herd, it could indicate that the cow is about to calf, that the animal is ill, that the animal is lost/stuck, that the animal is being pursued by a predator, or that the animal is being stolen. If the producer knew when the animal was not with the herd, a simple visit to see the separated animal could help further minimize animal losses.Furthermore, animal location data over time will yield an animal location "heat map" which can also be used by the producer to determine forage quality in various pastures and areas, which would be useful to the producer for future pasture improvement efforts.The focus of the effort for this Phase I grant is to four-fold: 1) develop the embedded ear-tag-tracking device - both hardware and embedded software; 2) develop server-side "backend" software including database management and necessary algorithms to trigger alerts and manage the database itself; 3) develop rudimentary user-facing software (i.e. dashboard) to present information to the end-user, and finally, 4) explore market potential and commercialization avenues. Much more in-depth elaboration for each step is discussed in the Work Plan.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
50%
Developmental
50%
Goals / Objectives
Develop a bovine (cattle)ear tag device to track animallocation history, monitor the animal's behavior, and develop the necessary end user dashboard, all in an effort to help the farmer improve productivity.
Project Methods
Our team has already developed a basic prototype position tracking board. We will immediately add aSD card slot, a multipoint control unit, a non-volatile memory module, and a battery to the prototype board. These additions will allow the board to operate untethered for position and time data acquisition. Concurrently during this work stage, we will be examining power analysis of the board to determine best optimization levels. After this stage, we will replace our current GNSS module with a GNSS+cellular module. The selected module will allow time and position data collection, and transmission of the data to the cloud.On the software side, our team will focus on development of the embeded-side software on the module itself, as well as development of the end-user side of the software, where the user will be able to view and manage the data produced by the ear tags.Once a set of working prototype tags are developed, we will test the hardware and software on several small cattle herds and refine the hardware and software as needed.