As the population continues to grow around the world, the demand of products from livestock is increasing. With demand increasing at such a rapid pace, it is more important than ever to properly manage and maintain your livestock. Enter livestock monitoring.
What is Livestock Monitoring?
Livestock monitoring is a way for you to track the location, health, and produce real-time data on your livestock. This kind of data can help a farmer optimize breeding, feeding, and the overall productivity of the farm.
How Do You Manage Animals?
The most common way to manage your animals is via GPS tracking. For instance, a farmer can track a cow by placing a GPS tracking device on the cow’s tail, ear, leg, neck, or even have a tracker inserted into the animal. These sensors can do much more than track the location of your livestock.
What Are The Benefits of Livestock Tracking
Locating your livestock is obviously an important part of farming. Not only do you want to know where your livestock is – a lost cow doesn’t do you any good – but you also want to keep your livestock safe.
Livestock Safety
According to FarmProgress.com, in 2010, 19.4 million dollars worth of livestock was lost to predators in Texas. Just Texas. Knowing where your animals are to keep them safe from predators is a huge benefit of livestock management.
Weather is another cause of major losses of livestock. If you know where your animals are, you can get them to shelter before inclimate weather hits. According to the Animal Welfare Institute, over ten thousand cattle froze to death during a blizzard in South Dakota in 2013. That is a lot of livestock to lose, and livestock monitoring can help to prevent those types of loses.
Breeding
Livestock monitoring can help farmers determine when cows are in heat. According to Penn State Extension, it is estimated that only 50% of cattle are detected when they are in heat, and that up to 15% of cattle are misread as being in heat when they are not. This not only costs a farmer in reproduction of livestock, but also in missed milk production. Livestock monitoring helps increase the accuracy of livestock breeding, which increases your farms production and profits.
Animal Health
Livestock monitoring can help you save your livestock from disease, and prevent one animal from spreading disease to the whole herd. According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service database, over 3 million cattle died due to health and disease related problems in 2011. Livestock monitoring can help you more closely monitor an animal’s weight loss, decreases in activity, temperature, and help you isolate sick animals and get them the help they need, while saving the rest of your livestock.
Livestock monitoring is only one example of how IoT monitoring is changing not only business, but the way the world works. IoT monitoring can give us better insight on our environment, help keep us safe through crash detection, and help our businesses evolve and become more efficient. If you’d like to learn more about IoT monitoring, reach out to us at AvantGuard to get more information on the expanding world of IoT monitoring.
