Precision Livestock Production: GPS Animal Tracking

Zac Economou

The Precision Agriculture Research Group

A group of lecturers and researchers from across UNE Agronomy Animal science Physics Computational science

Adjunct staff NSW DPI Vic DEPI

Students Honours PhD

What are the challenges in grazing systems? Soils – nutrient management, fertiliser is one of

the biggest inputs to a grazing system Quantifying pastures – having access to

information around the amount, growth rate and quality of pasture to enable optimal stocking rate

Animal monitoring – understanding where your animals are up to in terms of production, health and welfare

Labour – using labour more efficiently, it’s the biggest cost in most farming operations

GPS tracking in the Mallee…

GPS tracking sheep in the Mallee

Why… Can we quantify how sheep graze Mallee

landscapes? Do sheep use different soil zones differently

across a field? If there is differential grazing pressure, how does

that translate into an impact on ground cover, biomass etc.?

What are the potential applications of this sort of data?

The sheep…

200 ewes grazed in the paddock 27 GPS collars deployed (we lost a

few) Locations tracked every 7 minutes

GPS tracking…

Summer Grazing 1 2

3 4

Winter Grazing

Paddock utilsiation

Autonomous Livestock Monitoring(Livestock tracking)

RBT/GPS and IMU (accelerometer) Ear Tag

GPS collar, store-on-board and part of herd

Real-time data delivery

Hmm, they were here this

morning???

Where are my animals?

Meanwhile 2km down the road

More than just “where are my cows?”

Clinical/sub-clinical disease detection

Barwick, Trotter, Dobos, Welch, Schnieder and Economou (2014) Understanding sheep behaviour from a tri-axial accelerometer. 2014 Australian and New Zealand Spatially Enabled Livestock Management Symposium, Hamilton NZ, Ed J Roberts, 18th November 2014, p. 9.

Autonomous livestock management (Virtual fencing)

Virtual Fencing?

Next steps – can we use to rotationally graze?

Conclusion

We need to understand variation as well as quantify it.

A number of technologies are on their way.

Questions needs to be answered before they are commercially available.

Offer a more precise way to manage animals and pasture