Sheep tracking technology

LionelNashe

Sheep farmers: Does a device exist that could alert you if some or all of your sheep were in distress? Say, being harassed by a dog or something? I'm thinking in terms of a heart-rate monitor attached to a few of your sheep, which would send an alert to a smart-phone. Would this work and would it be of any use? Or how about location-tracking for sheep that are loose on a mountain?

roosky

LionelNashe wrote: »

Sheep farmers: Does a device exist that could alert you if some or all of your sheep were in distress? Say, being harassed by a dog or something? I'm thinking in terms of a heart-rate monitor attached to a few of your sheep, which would send an alert to a smart-phone. Would this work and would it be of any use? Or how about location-tracking for sheep that are loose on a mountain?

Im sure there are gps trackers they are used for wildlife study but heart rate monitor Im not sure

It would be easy to set the GPS to alert if the sheep was running for more than 30 seconds or something

NinetyTwoTeam

I was doing a course where we had to come up with an app to be used in conjunction with a drone and one of the groups came up with using the drone to track lost sheep once they wandered too far away, I thought it was a fantastic idea. Drones usually have cameras mounted on them and so could lead you right to the sheep, and you could also view if the sheep was in distress, caught on something etc.

Siamsa Sessions

I've seen various 'ICT-agri' presentations and tracking animals is a regular feature.

The issue with sheep is that they are individually a low value animal, apart from pedigree breeding stock. Unless the GPS tracking device is free or very low cost (and low maintenance), then it's unlikely to be worth the effort for the farmer to tag all his ewes.

Now, if you could incorporate GPS into an e-ID tag, then you might be onto something! But it'll come down to cost per unit again.

LionelNashe

Siamsa Sessions wrote: »

I've seen various 'ICT-agri' presentations and tracking animals is a regular feature.

The issue with sheep is that they are individually a low value animal, apart from pedigree breeding stock. Unless the GPS tracking device is free or very low cost (and low maintenance), then it's unlikely to be worth the effort for the farmer to tag all his ewes.

Now, if you could incorporate GPS into an e-ID tag, then you might be onto something! But it'll come down to cost per unit again.

What I had in mind is that you would just tag a small number of a flock, and these would be enough for you to know if there was something wrong, like a dog attacking. As for geolocation, I guess that tracking a small number of the sheep would only work if sheep tend to stick together. From an episode of Bonanza I saw once, where there was conflict between the cowboys and a sheep-herder, I thought that sheep do tend to stick together, but I don't know if that's true.

Come to think of it, with voice-recognition and AI being what it is, I would have thought that it would be possible to plant a microphone in the field or on a sheep, and that a computer would recognise sounds of barking or distress.

In terms of cost, I did a bit of googling yesterday and saw that there is a thing called narrow-band internet-of-things, which is low energy, so easy on batteries, and has other advantages. They're trialling it with a few thousand sheep in Norway.

Siamsa Sessions

Narrow band IoT is a similar approach to “slicing” in network management as far as I know, where you essentially rent different parts of the network (radio access, transport, data/control plane, etc.) rather than provisioning a whole new system. It definitely has its merits but lots of work needs to be done. Low-power is a pre-requisite.

The idea of tagging just a % of the sheep would reduce costs. Just don’t pick the ones that are inclined to jump ditches!

I think looking at what’s being done in the dairy sector might give an idea of what may become economically viable in beef and sheep. To use the tech speak, dairy cows are lead innovators while suckers and sheep are late adopters.

(never thought I’d use the off-farm language on here - apologies!)

Lano Lynn

jayus don't b givin Creed more stupid ideas:mad:

Dinzee Conlee

Seen this ad on tele last night...

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/internet-of-things/protecting-endangered-rhinos/

LionelNashe

Dinzee Conlee wrote: »

Seen this ad on tele last night...

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/internet-of-things/protecting-endangered-rhinos/

Interesting. That's what I had in mind, but where they're talking about sentinel impala, I was thinking of sentinel sheep.