Wireless telemetry for livestock condition monitoring

The challenges faced by modern agriculture have never been greater. With feedstock and labour prices increasing and constant pressure from retailers to keep food prices low, profit margins are at a point where farmers cannot grow their business to longer-term economically viable sizes. Recent high profile welfare threats such as the BSE and Foot and Mouth outbreaks in the UK have further weakened the financial positions of many in the industry. This paper examines the application of WSNs to livestock monitoring and the issues that accompany the timely reporting of animal health or welfare conditions to farm management. The focus lies mainly on the challenges stemming from data transportation from cattle mounted sensory devices in particular and maintaining sensory node support independent of animal mobility. The core of this study is to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks by using alternative cheap, low power consumption sensor nodes capable of providing real-time communication at a reasonable hardware cost. In this paper, both the hardware and software has been designed to provide a solution which can obtain real-time data from diary or beef cattle whilst conforming to the limitations associated with WSNs implementations.