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Danish Dairies Adopt RFID to Improve Yield
Detecting ketosis early in its onset is key for dairy farmers, Hindhede explains, because if left untreated, the disease will cause a cow to cease lactating. Once that happens, the farmer will need to have the animal slaughtered because it will no longer be profitable to keep it alive. Farmers generally realize that a cow has the disease after noticing changes in its stool and eating pattern, but Hindhede and Florczak contend that using the CowDetect system to analyze each animal's eating and movement patterns can result in a diagnosis up to a week sooner than was possible without the technology. A cow with ketosis, Hindhede says, may stop lactating within 14 days if left untreated.
Florczak developed a set of algorithms that use combinations of the indicators to create alerts in the CowDetect software. Farmers can employ these alerts to locate and inspect a particular animal for sickness, or to schedule an insemination if the indicators suggest an impending ovulation.
While the Ubisense tags and software can quickly locate individual animals to within roughly 15 centimeters (5.9 inches), Florczak says this is not sufficiently precise to carry out some of the measurements required to detect certain body positions or subtle movements that animal specialists say are important to monitor. So in order to provide more precise measurements, Florczak combined the Ubisense tags with a secondary non-RFID technology (he declines to provide additional details since his patent on the combined technologies is still pending). The two devices, along with a battery that powers them both (thereby providing supplemental power to the integrated battery in the Ubisense tag), are placed in a rugged housing that attaches to a collar surrounding each cow's neck.
According to Florczak, for a farm with 200 cows—and, therefore, demand for 200 of the customized Ubisense tag modules—the per-animal cost of the CowDetect system is €360 ($511). This expense covers all necessary hardware and software, but does not include installation labor costs. The CowDetect system is available globally through SmarterFarming, wherever the Ubisense system is sold—including throughout Europe, North America and some parts of Asia.
Based on what it has observed on the farms using CowDetect to track and monitor lactating cows, AgroTech estimates that farmers can save between €315 and €355 ($448 and $505) annually, per animal, based on lower labor costs and higher herd productivity.
In the United States, a company called TekVet launched a similar solution for tracking beef cattle in 2006 (see TekVet-IBM Cattle Tracker Uses Active RFID Tags, Satellite Communication). The system includes active 418 MHz RFID tags with a temperature sensor that fit inside an animal's ear canal, adjacent to the tympanic membrane. Once every hour, the tag transmits its unique ID number and the animal's temperature to RFID readers attached to poles, or to walls of buildings on a cattle producer's lot. TekVet claims its health-monitoring system can immediately identify a rise in temperature associated with many common illnesses, thereby allowing the livestock producer to provide early treatment, and thus improve the prospects for recovery.
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Florczak developed a set of algorithms that use combinations of the indicators to create alerts in the CowDetect software. Farmers can employ these alerts to locate and inspect a particular animal for sickness, or to schedule an insemination if the indicators suggest an impending ovulation.
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| The CowDetect tag (encased in a blue-green plastic housing) |
While the Ubisense tags and software can quickly locate individual animals to within roughly 15 centimeters (5.9 inches), Florczak says this is not sufficiently precise to carry out some of the measurements required to detect certain body positions or subtle movements that animal specialists say are important to monitor. So in order to provide more precise measurements, Florczak combined the Ubisense tags with a secondary non-RFID technology (he declines to provide additional details since his patent on the combined technologies is still pending). The two devices, along with a battery that powers them both (thereby providing supplemental power to the integrated battery in the Ubisense tag), are placed in a rugged housing that attaches to a collar surrounding each cow's neck.
According to Florczak, for a farm with 200 cows—and, therefore, demand for 200 of the customized Ubisense tag modules—the per-animal cost of the CowDetect system is €360 ($511). This expense covers all necessary hardware and software, but does not include installation labor costs. The CowDetect system is available globally through SmarterFarming, wherever the Ubisense system is sold—including throughout Europe, North America and some parts of Asia.
In the United States, a company called TekVet launched a similar solution for tracking beef cattle in 2006 (see TekVet-IBM Cattle Tracker Uses Active RFID Tags, Satellite Communication). The system includes active 418 MHz RFID tags with a temperature sensor that fit inside an animal's ear canal, adjacent to the tympanic membrane. Once every hour, the tag transmits its unique ID number and the animal's temperature to RFID readers attached to poles, or to walls of buildings on a cattle producer's lot. TekVet claims its health-monitoring system can immediately identify a rise in temperature associated with many common illnesses, thereby allowing the livestock producer to provide early treatment, and thus improve the prospects for recovery.
