The essence of the idea is to create a cattle tracking device that will be integrated into an ear tag, and to provide valuable insights and data-based notifications to producers. The use of ear tags is a common standard in the cattle industry to keep track of animal's identification to monitor health, breeding, feeding, and overall performance. In pasture-based operations (typical for small and midsize beef farms), the ear tags are usually just a number. The number corresponds to documented information such as which year the cow was born, which number the animal was in the births of that year, if male or female (right ear/left ear methodology), and so on. Often, ear tags are impregnated with insecticides to reduce face flies and other annoying parasites.The proposed project will take the use of a basic ear tag much further by integrating a tracking device into the ear tag. This will allow the producer to monitor the animal's movement. Why is this beneficial? First, it is important to understand that cattle are "herd" animals, meaning that they generally stay together as they eat, drink, and sleep. When an animal leaves the herd, it could indicate that the cow is about to calf, that the animal is ill, that the animal is lost/stuck, that the animal is being pursued by a predator, or that the animal is being stolen. If the producer knew when the animal was not with the herd, a simple visit to see the separated animal could help further minimize animal losses.Furthermore, animal location data over time will yield an animal location "heat map" which can also be used by the producer to determine forage quality in various pastures and areas, which would be useful to the producer for future pasture improvement efforts.The focus of the effort for this Phase I grant is to four-fold: 1) develop the embedded ear-tag-tracking device - both hardware and embedded software; 2) develop server-side "backend" software including database management and necessary algorithms to trigger alerts and manage the database itself; 3) develop rudimentary user-facing software (i.e. dashboard) to present information to the end-user, and finally, 4) explore market potential and commercialization avenues. Much more in-depth elaboration for each step is discussed in the Work Plan.
