Smart Paddock deployment of sheep and cattle tracking tags at Romani Pastoral
| Publication date: | 29 June 2022 |
| Project status: | Completed |
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Summary
Digital farms are important for the longevity of Australian red meat supply chains, whether that be to inform consumers of our credentials (CN30 and Beef Sustainability initiative) or to improve business productivity. This project is the second digital farm to be rolled out and will focus on installation requirements, farm user experience and quantifying the return on investment. This component partnered with Smart Paddock to deploy their GPS location tracking cattle and sheep collars. 95 collars were attached to livestock with data being sent to the Smart Paddock platform and made available to Romani staff via a web dashboard. Data captured includes the GPS location of the animal, as well as temperate recorded on the tag.
Objectives
This project aimed to install GPS tags on livestock at Romani Pastoral to monitor animal location and potentially identify health issues while also testing the technologies capabilities. This included supplying, installing and making operational the following digital components:
• 1.100 x Bluebell GPS tags (Collar mounted) incl. batteries
• 1 x Site visit
• 3 x Software services and customization for network gateway provider integration
• 1 x Shipping (road transport)
• 100 x 12 months ongoing platform service and support fees ($1/tag/month)
Will have trained and acquired sign-off from Romani Pastoral Company’s General Manager and MLA’s innovation and Events Coordinator.
Key findings
The deployment of the Smart Paddock solution on both sheep and cattle has demonstrated the ability to roll out the solution on a large property successfully. It is technically and practically possible to deploy LoRaWAN network infrastructure to properties to
allow the live tracking of cattle and sheep.
The LoRaWAN network installed proved effective to cover all required paddocks involved in the project. Retention on collars proved to be an issue with a number of cattle collars braking while being attached to animals and 20% of sheep collars coming off the animals during the trial, from broken buckles of slipping of the neck of animals.
Benefits to industry
Digital AgTech providers often make fictious claims about where their technologies and solutions are up to. Digital farms play an important role in vexing these claims and determining what Red Meat Producers can deploy today and the value proposition behind each. This component assessed the suitability of GPS collar tags to monitor cattle location and explore potential use cases of this technology.
MLA action
The learnings from the Romani Digital demonstration farm project has helped shape the MLA Digital Agriculture business plan. A need has been identified to further test AgTech which is market ready with producers in real world situations to identify the use cases and value propositions of the solutions beyond the simple demonstration of them. This is guiding the current and future MLA investments in this space.
Future research
There are obvious benefits to knowing where your livestock currently are in the paddock with the Smart Paddock solution. It is believed that there are benefits of greater value such as understanding specific animal behaviours around joining activity, calving detection and pasture management. There are not fully understood and should be the focus of future research.
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For more information Contact Project Manager: John McGuren E: reports@mla.com.au |
