Smart monitoring of cattle on pasture According to the Swedish Board of Agriculture, meadows and pastures have decreased by hundreds of thousands of hectares in Sweden over the past hundred years. Valuable pastures can be located far from the farm, which means that the farmer chooses not to use it as it means long transport distances for daily supervision and monitoring of the animals. The problem has become more common with the structural change towards fewer and larger farms that has taken place in agriculture in recent decades. Farmers can, when the pasture is far from the farm, hire people who live closer to the pasture for the day-to-day care of the animals. However, counting the animals can be a task that is difficult to maintain, as it can be difficult even for an experienced zookeeper, especially if it is a larger group of animals and hilly terrain. If this step is handled automatically, it will be easier for the farmer to hire another person for the daily care of the animals and thus the possibility of using hard-to-reach pasture is increased. The project focused on finding low-cost and smart technical solutions to facilitate the tracking of animals, with the aim of developing a monitoring system for cattle on pasture to ensure that the animals are counted as part of a farmer’s daily supervision. The monitoring system that has been developed uses satellite communication to send the position of the animals up to four times a day to a mobile app, which gives the farmers an indication that all the animals have moved. In addition, the farmer receives alarms via email if the animals have too little activity or have moved outside of their designated pasture. Based on the experience from the field trials that were carried out, and from feedback from the farmers who participated in the project, it is concluded that the monitoring system can facilitate the monitoring of animals on pasture and at the same time be economically viable for a farmer. However, there is an opportunity to further develop the monitoring system to add functions such as water and electrical fence monitoring, which would make it possible to handle even more of the daily supervision digitally and only have manual supervision a few times a week.
Denna rapport är resultatet av projektet ”Övervakning av nötkreatur och får på bete för säkrare djurskydd och ökad utnyttjande av betesmark” som finansierats av Landsbygdsprogrammet 2014–2020. Stödet från Landsbygdsprogrammet 2014–2020 finansieras delvis av pengar från Europeiska jordbruksfonden för landsbygdsutveckling.