Dairy Farmers Use 5G Connected Collars for Better Farm Administration
The fitness craze has led to a large volume of new devices dealing with monitoring how much people exercise to stave off unhealthy lifestyles. A British farm is utilizing similar devices connected through the 5G network to monitor the fitness of cows on their farm. The aim is to ensure that the cows remain healthy and increase the efficiency of the dairy farm in the process.
All one hundred and eighty cows on the farm have been fitted with these collars which monitor the walking and running of the animals, as well as their eating habits. The collected data is transmitted back to a cloud account registered for this specific purpose. An algorithm then analyzes the collected data and notifies both farmers and veterinarians through a smartphone app if it detects anything that they should be concerned about.
Remote Cow Ranching Now a Reality
These devices offer farmers the ability to manage herds without even being present on the farm. Because of the large volume of animals in a given farm, determining when one of them has a problem has been a traditional issue. As farms get larger, the problem compounds on itself, and it becomes even more challenging to determine what is wrong from the available data. The application automates this decision-making process and can even pinpoint which cow the farmer should check out.
The farm, located in Somerset, England, has its own 5G network independent of the existing broadband on the holding. The 5G network offers faster speeds for data transfer and makes for more efficient use of the collars. While the hardware could use the existing broadband network on the farm, data transfer speeds would be slower. The result would be that the app’s notifications would be significantly slower. Cows are only the beginning, as researchers state that similar technology can also be used to monitor pigs, beef cattle, poultry, and, surprisingly enough, fish.
