Austria’s Smartbow GmbH has won a EuroTier Gold Innovation Award medal for its new EartagLIFE. This latest tag provides information for heat detection, rumination and health monitoring, and information on the cow’s location in real-time.
The company has been building this type of system for several years, allowing behaviour of animals and their position to be recorded with modern sensors. Receivers both indoor and outdoors collect the data and forward it to a local server, where it is detected and analyzed by self-learning algorithms. In case of heat or a metabolic disorder, the farmer gets an alert on his PC, smartphone (SMS) or tablet, with the cow’s current position displayed on a digital map of the barn.
The Smartbow system is used worldwide because of its unique characteristics. It can be found on farms from small-sized units about 40 head in Austria to large farms in Russia with almost 5,000 cattle. Enquiries from the United Arab Emirates, New Zealand and Australia are currently in progress.
Easy installation and simple usability make the system an excellent tool for the managers working in modern animal husbandry. The monitoring system and the existing Smartbow Eartag was designed to allow comprehensive monitoring of animals only during their highest performance phase.
Monitoring for a lifetime
The goal of monitoring an animal from its birth and providing gapless information throughout its life was previously technically impossible. But because maximum vitality, health and productivity in youth development are crucial factors for the later performance of each individual animal, Smartbow recognised that continuous data recording throughout was the key for a successful future.
The new EartagLIFE (pictured top) can be used for just that purpose. Due to its low weight of about 20g, it’s possible to use the EartagLIFE on calves to record health information from the first day of life. For the first time, gapless data over the whole lifetime of the animal is provided.
Thanks to a new unique electronic circuit concept on the EartagLIFE, a lifetime of six years can be achieved, again allowing the animal to be monitored through all stages of production. An optimised manufacturing process allows low-cost production. An integrated LED enables the farm manager to find the animal fast in case of selective alerts, and RFID is additionally integrated for animal identification and can serve as access authorisation for the milking palour or feeding.
Simplification of herd management
The daily work of farmers will be eased significantly by the EartagLIFE. With its simple mounting of the official eartag at the birth of the animal, a monitoring system and a system for identification via RFID can be installed in one operation.
The manual assignment of the life number to the number of the monitoring system and RFID tag is no longer necessary. Thus, the life number can be used as unique identification of the animal and sensor. If an EartagLIFE is lost, it can be easily ordered as the current available official eartags. In contrast to other systems the data will be forwarded and calculated in real-time on the computer at the farm.
With the EartagLIFE, not only the farm manager has important real-time information, but the data can be analysed to help feeding experts or vets to decide the right management actions. The gapless data recording of the whole life of the animal creates entirely new data collection option for research and science. There will also be the ability to develop new approaches to improving the selection of animals for breeding.
The collection of all this data means the future performance of the animal can be estimated early. Equally important is the ability to use the information to wor out the causes of performance loss. The data can be traced back to the first day to try and work out if and where wrong management actions were taken.
For more information visit: www.smartbow.at.
