Comment by adamauckland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamauckland | Hacker News Reader

So I actually started a business back in 2012 specifically for animal tracking on farms (cows and sheep).

We tried BLE, image detection, loads of different approaches which worked at "prototype scale", the problems were:

1. Farms are geographically big, tend to have hills and metal stuff which bounces signals all over the place. LoRa is slow, BLE has a short area. If you're close enough to connect with the cow, you might as well get out the truck and do whatever it is yourself.

2. Animals, especially cows, can and will destroy anything they trample. That includes expensive dongles, wifi base stations, pipes, electric lines. This infrastructure is flimsy and hardening it costs money, especially against water ingress.

3. Cost. A $20 tech strapped to a $100 animal is a considerable percentage of your RoI. The margins are so low, it's just not worth doing this at scale.

The thing is, there is no tech solution that does cattle herding better than a farmer.

Did you look at drones recently? I ran into the same problems as you years ago on an outdoor monitoring PoC with stations spread over several dozen miles (it was cheaper to pay an intern than to deploy & upkeep the tech). For farming use cases, though, drones + CV at least seem to be a pretty decent solution to some problems.

Yeah, we've tried drones. Problem is identification. E-tags on animals require a proximity of below a metre and stock are jittery around flying robots.

Like you said, it's actually easier to get a quadbike and go look.

This might not work for traditional livestock operations but for certain boutique farms and ranches (think farms raising Wagyu and other sought after breeds - and even non-meat concerns) the proportional cost is much lower - and the benefits potentially much higher, given the potential economic losses if certain animals (such as a prized stud) were to encounter some kind of preventable incident.

A cow only costs $100?

A one day old calf that may or may not survive, can go as low as 50 bucks.

But no, typically a cow costs on the order of a thousand dollars.

Exactly, part of the problem, tags go on at birth, so at what point do you stick the expensive tags on?

Tags do not go on at birth. The mother cows have their calves and then much later when the rancher rounds them up the calves tend to stick by their mothers so we know what calf belongs to what cow.

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