Taking Care of Cattle with Unprecedented Benefits Using IoT, Thanks to Cattle-Watch and Actility

Cattle–Watch is an AI Remote monitoring system based on electronics collars that provide farmers with comprehensive behavioral analysis and alerts, including activity, theft alert, Geo fence, herd counting, Bull performance, calve delivery, and cattle location. The system increases profits through increased calving yields as well as reducing losses, allowing farmers to focus on more value-added tasks. Cattle–Watch devices communicate using an ultra-low-power LoRaWAN® network communicating with the electronic collars, powered by Actility’s ThingPark™ industrial LPWAN platform.

Cattle-Watch Pervasive AI leveraging Actility ThingPark® Improves Cattle Health, Increases Calving & Profitability 

Many areas around the globe are struggling with calving yield. Farmers have been seeking ways to increase the number of calves and as a result, increase their revenue.  

Cattle-Watch, a Smart Agriculture company founded in 2013 in Israel with ongoing projects in Europe, Pacific, Africa, and South America, identified these needs and focused on the biological status of the cows, realizing that when behavioral habits of the cattle are optimized, the biological status increases and the number of calves peaks. 

Cattle-Watch created a system that tracks cattle every 10 to 20 minutes to identify these behavioral habits. After analyzing them through an Artificial Intelligence system, Cattle-Watch is able to detect possible illnesses, attacks, thefts, etc. This information enables farmers to reduce losses and improve calving. 

Real-time cattle location and herd counting help fight theft and recover lost cattle. After the AI system has raised an alert, Cattle-Watch sends drones, pre-positioned on each farm, to the area of distress and get real-time images of what is happening, helping farmers make real-time decisions, saving time and resources. These drones can also be controlled by the farmer at any moment from any smartphone, computer, or tablet.

ThingPark® Industrial LoRaWAN® Technology Provides Pervasive Real-time Data Collection with no Dead Zones.  

Collars are placed on each animal and fitted with a purpose-built LoRaWAN® sensor including motion sensing, body temperature measurement, and tracking functions. The trackers have edge intelligence optimizing data transmission based on flexible triggers and typically provide over a year of battery life. The collected data and alert triggers are transmitted in real-time to the Cattle-Watch AI system through the ThingPark® LoRaWAN® network, and up-to-date behavioral analysis is continuously made available by Cattle-Watch to farmers. The AI system can also tune edge sensor triggers and other settings without requiring any physical manipulation, as the LoRaWAN® network is bidirectional. 

The LoRaWAN® technology is extremely low power, allowing years of battery autonomy. The ThingPark® industrial network system dynamically optimizes transmission parameters and fully leverages macro-diversity over the farming area to provide robust data collection even in metal buildings and other difficult spots. All wireless base stations, each with a range up to 15km, collaborate to provide seamless indoor and outdoor coverage across the farming domain. The system blends long-range connectivity from ground base stations with satellite connectivity to ensure connection even in the most remote areas of the world. Many of Cattle-Watch equipped farms are located in remote locations, e.g. in Africa, not covered by any public communication network.   

In order to fully package the solution and streamline the deployment of Low-Power WAN networks, Cattle-Watch has joined with Actility’s ThingPark Embedded program, where solution providers embed Actility’s industrial LPWAN network management technology,  -trusted by over 50 public LPWAN networks worldwide, into their vertical products and deploy anywhere their business requires. This way Cattle-Watch can deploy on-demand private LoRaWAN® networks or leverage public LoRaWAN networks through the Actility ThingPark Exchange roaming and peering hub. ThingPark Embedded has a flexible pricing model aligning to the needs of solution providers and its all-inclusive licensing allows hassle-free adaptation to the requirements of each field deployment.

“We chose Actility because we needed an easy solution which had a fully integrated offer. Their team provided us with many facilities and local support, also offering us a pricing structure that adjusted to our pricing-per-collar model and made it very easy to work with them”

Ilan Arbel, CEO of Cattle-Watch

Animal Behavior Tracked to Increase Profits 

The use of these trackers, combined with LoRaWAN® technology opens a wide range of possibilities, especially to increase production and revenues. In areas affected by livestock shortages, being able to monitor cattle, allows farmers not only to react quickly to unusual events but also to prevent these problems and to make the best possible use of their investments.

“The Cattle-Watch offer is unique on the market, with its ability to be deployed anywhere leveraging LoRaWAN® and satellite technology and AI technology backed by automated drone control to always keep the farmer at the center of each decision. We are happy to serve Cattle-Watch global go-to-market strategy by leveraging Actility’s ThingPark industrial LPWAN platform, available worldwide as hosted service or on-premise”

Olivier Hersent – CEO & CTO, Actility

Making Cattle’s Welfare a Priority 

Cattle-Watch is currently participating in H2020 project, ClearFarm, funded by the European Commission. This project aims to improve the welfare of pig and dairy cattle on production farms. Together with the Actility’s communication network, Cattle-Watch is collaborated with the project partners to design a software platform which will provide animal welfare information collected by sensors to farmers, to help them optimize their production processes and provide customers more information on the background of the animals producing the products they consume. 

This project not only involves farmers and consumers but also regulators and policymakers who will benefit from all the information given by the platform. This offers the opportunity to guarantee an animal’s well-being while helping to contribute to sustainable pig and cattle production. 

About Actility: 

Actility is a world leader in Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) industrial-grade connectivity solutions for the Internet of Things. Actility provides its ThingPark® network core and platform to deploy, operate, and maintain public and private wireless IoT networks within a unified, scalable, and versatile network infrastructure. Over 50 public network services providers and thousands of enterprises trust the ThingPark platform all over the world. Actility also provides patented ultra-low-power geolocation technologies through its subsidiary Abeeway. ThingPark Market supplies the largest selection of interoperable IoT gateways, devices, and apps to simplify and accelerate deployment of Applications. 

About Cattle-Watch: 

Cattle-Watch is a company founded in 2013, which offers tracking solutions for cattle in order to monetarize their behavior and gather conclusions from it. These conclusions allow farmers to prevent problems that might be affecting their cattle development and, in consequence, their farm’s revenue. 

About ClearFarm: 

ClearFarm is an H2020 EU project aimed at creating a platform aimed to control animal welfare in pig and dairy cattle farming. The project will use precision livestock farming technology (PLF) and integration of animal-based data to enable improved animal welfare across the entire production chain. This will contribute to improved sustainable pig and dairy cattle production, the two livestock production systems with the highest shares of livestock products in Europe. It will co-design, develop and validate a platform that will inform both farmers and consumers to assist their decision-making.