Smart Livestock Monitoring: Sustainable Innovation Pilot 2
The management of livestock herds in extensive grazing systems presents an ongoing set of operational challenges for farmers. As herd sizes increase and grazing areas expand, traditional manual monitoring methods become increasingly unsustainable, labor-intensive, and costly. Sustainable Innovation Pilot 2 (SIP2) led by Idele (France) addresses these limitations by introducing an advanced livestock monitoring system based on UHF (Ultra High Frequency) electronic identification technologies. This solution delivers real-time tracking, automated health monitoring, and early warning capabilities, supporting both animal welfare and operational efficiency.
Farmers managing herds on large pasturelands typically rely on daily physical inspections to verify animal presence, monitor behavior, and detect early signs of illness or injury. However, this approach demands significant labor resources and often fails to identify early-stage health issues until they escalate into more serious conditions. Animals may wander or become isolated due to illness or environmental stress, making timely detection difficult. This lack of immediate visibility into herd health increases the risk of productivity losses, higher veterinary costs, and preventable livestock fatalities.
SIP2 introduces a fully automated RFID-based tracking solution that fundamentally changes how livestock are monitored. Each animal is equipped with a passive UHF ear tag containing a unique digital identifier. These tags allow automated identification of individual animals without the need for batteries, reducing maintenance and long-term operating costs. Automated reading stations installed at key locations—such as watering points and feeding areas—regularly scan the ear tags as animals pass by. This simple but powerful mechanism enables continuous logging of each animal’s presence, drinking behavior, and movement patterns across the grazing area.
The system generates comprehensive behavioral profiles for each animal by analyzing patterns in these readings over time. Changes in drinking frequency, feeding behavior, or location can indicate potential health issues long before clinical symptoms become visible. Instead of relying on human observation alone, farmers can monitor behavioral trends remotely and receive alerts when deviations from normal patterns occur. Early detection enables faster intervention, minimizing the impact of illnesses on animal health and farm productivity.
Beyond health monitoring, SIP2 provides accurate location tracking, helping farmers efficiently locate individual animals across wide, often remote grazing areas. Geotagged data collected from scanning points provides near real-time visibility into the distribution and movement of the entire herd. This functionality significantly reduces time spent locating lost or isolated animals, freeing up valuable labor resources for other essential farm activities.
SIP2 supports both cloud-based and edge-based deployment models. In the cloud-based configuration, all collected data is transmitted to centralized servers where behavioral analysis and long-term trend evaluations are performed. This model is well suited for farms with reliable connectivity and centralized management operations. Alternatively, the edge-based model performs data processing directly on-site, allowing for real-time monitoring and immediate alert generation even in remote areas with limited or no network access. This dual-model flexibility ensures that the system can be deployed across a wide range of farming environments and infrastructures.
The livestock monitoring ADS is fully integrated with OpenAgri’s broader Open Source platform, benefiting from multiple OS services. The Weather Data Service incorporates climate and temperature data into herd health risk assessments, helping farmers anticipate heat stress or cold exposure risks. The Farm Calendar & Reporting Service logs daily animal monitoring data, supports record-keeping, and generates comprehensive reports for herd health management. The Livestock Health Management Module builds historical health profiles for each animal, improving both preventive care and veterinary intervention planning.
By adopting SIP2, farmers benefit from substantial operational and economic advantages. The system reduces the need for costly daily field visits while ensuring comprehensive and continuous animal monitoring. Early detection of behavioral anomalies leads to faster interventions, improving animal welfare and reducing mortality rates. Remote monitoring allows farmers to better allocate staff resources, prioritize at-risk animals, and operate more efficiently across larger grazing areas. Importantly, the system’s automated nature ensures data consistency and objectivity, eliminating many of the limitations inherent to human observation.
SIP2 offers livestock farmers a scalable, sustainable solution to one of the sector’s most persistent challenges: the need for reliable, continuous, and cost-effective herd management. As agriculture increasingly embraces data-driven practices, this pilot demonstrates how practical, accessible technologies can deliver immediate benefits while laying the foundation for smarter, more sustainable animal husbandry in the years ahead.