In traditional livestock production, the herd or flock is the primary unit. A facility will house a herd of cattle or a flock of chickens where management provides food, water, medicine, and shelter. Monitoring the health and well-being of a large group of animals is challenging because there is limited time, energy, and resources.
Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) opens possibilities to change the group paradigm of livestock management and production. PLF is smart technology that enables individual animals to be monitored closely on farms even as operations continue to get larger. Automated real-time digital monitoring of the entire herd or flock using sensors, analysis and reporting allows for knowledge about individual animals as well as the group.
HerdWhistle is a scalable 24/7precision livestock monitoring system designed to collect individual and group animal data and provide alerts, analysis, and reports to management. A proprietary radio frequency identification (RFID) backbone scales to size for the largest farms and ranches.
The primary market for HerdWhistle are cattle feedlots. The fundamental configuration for HerdWhistle is an RFID ear tag for every cow and antennas for every feed bunk and water trough. Eating and drinking behavior is tracked for every head 24/7. The system reports indicators of distress, injury, and illness up to seven days before visible symptoms can be seen. Alerts are sent automatically to management when an animal has a potential problem.
HerdWhistle can use a variety of biometric sensors to monitor behavioral and physiological aspects of livestock. They allow ranchers and farmers to monitor an animal’s health and wellbeing around the clock.
HerdWhistle is part of the Precision Livestock Farming initiative to improve efficiencies across the productivity spectrum in the cattle industry. Cattle industry production has gotten more efficient over time. The number of cattle in the U.S. has fallen from 97.8 million in 1960 when the US population was 180.7 million to 88.5 in 2014 with a US population of 318.4 million, while the number of pounds produced has risen over the same time.
By 2050 the world’s population will reach 9.1 billion, 34 percent higher than today. Sustainable food production must increase by 70 percent without ravaging resources and the environment. PFL can be used to continually improve productivity in livestock production.
