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A smart collar for cows

thehustle.co

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Re: A smart collar for cows

#61

Post by immmmmm »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #40
immmmmm wrote: post #26

in switzerland we call that a bell. coupled with extremely sensitive sensors we call ears, farmers can find a lost cow far away in the mountain. bonus point: tourists love those so much you can buy smaller models at the airport.

What is 'far away' in Switzerland? I'm in Australia and have a small beef farm and there no way a bell could let you know where cows always are. They get into a gully on the other side of your property etc sound wont travel. I only have a small property I run as a side business vs many family farmers on thousands or 10's of thousands of acres. The really big properties get I to millions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wi…

pasture management is indeed a big one, i heard that proper herding can increase drastically soil carbon intake in some cases. i do doubt however that climate management is the primary goal of most industrial farm with 1+ million cows. my comment was on the hi/low tech joke side originally, but i wonder if a technology that would allow even more industrial farming is a good thing.

Re: A smart collar for cows

#62

Post by causi »

rapjr9 wrote: post #53

I worked on research in electronically herding cows for a while: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/animals_robots/cow_herding/... The collar you see there had a Zaurus PDA which ran the herding algorithm and managed the ad-hoc peer-to-peer wireless network between the cows. Each collar also had a GPS unit and a tiny guitar amplifier/speaker was used to amplify the sounds (WAV files played by the Zaurus). We had only m…

Ah, Zaurus. Those devices were way before their time. Maybe Pinephone will eventually fill that space.

Re: A smart collar for cows

#63

Post by bluGill »

immmmmm wrote: post #61
Gustomaximus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 'far away' in Switzerland? I'm in Australia and have a small beef farm and there no way a bell could let you know where cows always are. They get into a gully on the other side of your property etc sound wont travel. I only have a small property I run as a side business vs many family farmers on thousands or 10's of thousands of acres. The really big properties get I to millions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wi…

pasture management is indeed a big one, i heard that proper herding can increase drastically soil carbon intake in some cases. i do doubt however that climate management is the primary goal of most industrial farm with 1+ million cows. my comment was on the hi/low tech joke side originally, but i wonder if a technology that would allow even more industrial farming is a good thing.

Climate is just a side effect, that same management also allows a lot more cows on the same unit of land.

Though farmers are interested in selling carbon credits. This still needs figuring out, but of they can make some side cash they will.

Re: A smart collar for cows

#64

Post by WithinReason »

jessaustin wrote: post #27
akomtu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the theme of Quake2: captured humans were "automated" with implants. Today we start with cows, in 50 years we extend this to violent criminals and who knows, maybe in 100 years most of us will be automated for "safety reasons".

If all it takes is noise, vibration, and GPS they won't even have to use collars. Our phones already have those functions.

And they control us already

Re: A smart collar for cows

#65

Post by prawn »

flyinglizard wrote: post #18

I’ll just add that smart collars and sensors are pretty much the norm on cows, at least in Western Europe (which is generally at the forefront in terms of animal care and food safety regulations). The novelty here is the remote herdkeeping functions. The limit to adapting such tech is usually collar cost and battery life (the industry usually aims for 5+ years of battery life). Of course the environment is pretty hos…

I did some video work for a Dutch company selling such tech into Australia. Quite amazing to see it upfront. One dairy family talked about how it took them from scraping by to rekindling their enthusiasm for their farm.

That particular farm had collars and auto-switching gates plus four milking robots.

Re: A smart collar for cows

#66

Post by atdrummond »

adamauckland wrote: post #56

So I actually started a business back in 2012 specifically for animal tracking on farms (cows and sheep). We tried BLE, image detection, loads of different approaches which worked at "prototype scale", the problems were: 1. Farms are geographically big, tend to have hills and metal stuff which bounces signals all over the place. LoRa is slow, BLE has a short area. If you're close enough to connect with the cow, you m…

This might not work for traditional livestock operations but for certain boutique farms and ranches (think farms raising Wagyu and other sought after breeds - and even non-meat concerns) the proportional cost is much lower - and the benefits potentially much higher, given the potential economic losses if certain animals (such as a prized stud) were to encounter some kind of preventable incident.

Re: A smart collar for cows

#67

Post by h2odragon »

markdown wrote: post #42
strict9 wrote: post #21

> Virtual fences keep the cows in designated areas, While the idea of vibrating collars to steer cattle makes me uneasy (what comes next?), I am somewhat hopeful this can address the issue of barbed wire fences. Interestingly, the idea of remotely controlling cattle was discussed several years ago in an article outlining the the issues with fences: https://prairieecologist.com/2015/03/17/hubbard-fellowship-b...

What's wrong with barbed wire fences?

Insurance companies have started requiring folks to remove them or pay extra for liability coverage from them. Someone told me the cost difference was worth swapping to electric fences and losing up to 6 cattle a year. I don't think they're accounting for who gets sued when their cows wander into the highway, tho.

Re: A smart collar for cows

#68

Post by vimy »

adamauckland wrote: post #56

So I actually started a business back in 2012 specifically for animal tracking on farms (cows and sheep). We tried BLE, image detection, loads of different approaches which worked at "prototype scale", the problems were: 1. Farms are geographically big, tend to have hills and metal stuff which bounces signals all over the place. LoRa is slow, BLE has a short area. If you're close enough to connect with the cow, you m…

A cow only costs $100?
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