A professor of precision livestock management at the School of Medical and Applied Sciences at Central Queensland University in Australia, Mark Trotter, has been researching smart e-tags, which are an emerging technology in the beef cattle industry.
Trotter was a speaker at the recent Oklahoma Beef Cattle Summit in Ada, and Oklahoma Farm Report’s Stevie White interviewed him prior to his presentation. Our BeefBuzz with Ron Hays is featuring comments from that conversation.
Trotter’s research team in Australia has been exploring options for utilizing the data from the tags and converting it into meaningful information to help cattle producers increase profitability, sustainability, or efficiency.
“There is a whole range of different applications that are going to fall out of this particular technology when it is fully mature,” Trotter explained. “Everything from basic stuff, like knowing that your cows are in the paddock that you put them in, and there is a whole other range of more advanced applications.”
He explained that the data that comes off of the smart tags, beyond the location data, the accelerometer data, functions similarly to Fitbit watches on people. He said, “We can actually start to interpret key behaviors like when a cow is calving, when she might be in an estrous cycle, and a whole range of other interesting behaviors. If a producer wants to know something, we can probably detect that using these sorts of sensors.”
Some areas of research include monitoring water system failures, predation detection, and forage quality or availability in pastures. Each of these things can be detected according to the behavior of the cattle being picked up by the smart tag sensor in their ears.
While smart e-tags are being commercially produced, Trotter warned that they are still an immature technology, comparing them to the “brick” phones of twenty years ago and iPhones of today. “We are in an early stage of commercialization, but you can go out and buy that technology now,” he said. “The different tags have different capabilities.”
Some e-tags provide GPS location data every half hour and others every six hours. The behavior measuring tags can vary widely; some provide more key data regarding rumination, resting, or grazing habits. One important difference is the technology required for the tags to transmit data, as some require a local Wi-Fi base station and others are direct to satellite.
“There are pros and cons to both because the satellite systems are much easier to deploy, tend to be more limited in terms of the data that you can get off of them, just because of the power requirements of this sort of satellite data transfer,” Trotter shared. “There is a range of different features that people need to think about before jumping in and buying this sort of technology.”
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