Accurate inventory management and supply chain efficiency have been a challenge for the livestock feed industry as monitoring the amount of feed inside a bin or a silo requires frequent time-consuming and potentially unsafe manual checks.
To offer a safer and more reliable system, IoT platform provider Soracom has teamed up with agriculture technology company BinSentry to leverage Soracom’s IoT building blocks and connectivity to enable its machine learning-enabled sensors to support intelligent, automated feed management solutions for feed mill operators, ag industry vertical integrators, and livestock farms.
The tech solution comes as workers at feed mills, vertical processing plants and livestock barns currently climb tall ladders multiple times each day and bend over the side of a silo to look deeply into it to assess the amount of feed remaining inside.
Agricultural Monitoring
According to BinSentry co-founder and CTO Nathan Hoel, the company currently has approximately 76,000 points they are measuring inside of a silo, and about 9,600 inside a feed bin, measured 50 times every five seconds.
“We now monitor 40,000 devices and send as much raw data back to the cloud as we can from our sensors to then apply AI to that raw data–about half a million total measurements–just to get an accurate assessment of the volume inside of a single bin,” said Hoel in a statement.
IoT Solutions
BinSentry is a company focused on IoT solution to enables feed mills and livestock producers effectively monitor on-farm inventory, dramatically increasing operational efficiencies. Powered by solar and operating on low-power, long range networks, their solution installs in less than 10 minutes and delivers data to the cloud, reliably and without interruption.
They use sensors that can be placed inside large feed bins, and that use infrared light pulses to measure feed levels. The image and distance data that is collected is transmitted back to the cloud to enable the creation of 3D images of feed bin inventories.
BinSentry official tout their offerings as an intelligent, automated remote monitoring solution that quickly and safely provides feed mills and others with extremely accurate inventory data. As a result, customers can automate ordering, prioritize production, and optimize the transportation of feed – eliminating feed outages while gaining more insight into animal performance.
Turn to Soracom
These requirements led BinSentry to Soracom for their package of reliable cellular IoT connectivity due to its need for reliable IoT connectivity to its on-site sensors spread widely across mostly-rural areas in North American markets. The company experimented with a number of connectivity technologies, including LoRaWAN and NB-IoT, before choosing LTE Cat-M1 because it ran off the same widespread, existing network as LTE phones.
“What we discovered was that having access to as many different carriers as possible in rural areas was extremely important,” Hoel said. “We needed an MVNO with as many carrier agreements as possible who would allow us to easily switch SIMs from one carrier to another when we need to.”
Soracom, technology partner to more than 20,000 startups, SMBs, and enterprises, offers solutions specifically designed to make it easy to build, operate, and scale IoT deployments. Kenta Yasukawa, Ph.D., CTO and co-founder of Soracom, Inc. staed being bearer, cloud and hardware-agnostic allows us freedom to partner directly with our customers to provide the right building blocks to enable and scale their IoT deployments.
“BinSentry’s experience is evidence of how reliable cellular IoT connectivity can power new business models in the agriculture industry, and other verticals as well,” said Yasukawa.