“Hey, Rowdy, you seen that ol’ brindle cow and her new calf today?”
“Naw, Mister Favor, sure ain’t. Should I ride over to the north pasture – see if she might’a got stuck in that buffalo wallow? Wouldn’t take more’n four or five hours. Or, maybe I should ride down to the south pasture? She might’a fallen into one of them blind ravines the cows are always findin’. I could make it there’n-back by nightfall.”
“Don’t bother, Rowdy. I’ll just pull her Zebra tag up on my tablet here. Well, I’ll be! She and the calf are over in the main feed lot. Heck, I was just there – don’t know how I missed her!”
A recent article in RFID Journal reminded me that RFID-logistics technology is changing how we track all manner of assets, even those as semi-autonomous as livestock. The article, entitled GEA CowVeiw Locates Cattle Via Active RFID, details Germany’s GEA Farm Technologies’ development of an application that deploys Zebra Technologies RFID tags and readers to track both the location and behavior of dairy cows. Maximizing efficiency is critical to any production enterprise and none more so than those with historically low profit margins, such as the diary industry.
The Zebra tags, specifically, it’s Ultra-Wideband (UWB) Dart RTLS system, identify each cow’s location within 12 inches – in real time! The application is able to read in excess of 5000 tags per second and features low-drain batteries for a battery service life of up to 7 years.
So, whether your logistics challenges include tracking the random movements of individual cows or the more predictable movements of whole truckloads of cattle, you can be confident that, with the backing of technology partners such as Zebra Technologies, L-Tron will provide the optimum custom-configured solution to your specific logistics challenges.