Beef prices are at record highs because the U.S. cattle herd hasn’t been this small since 1951. The chronic shortage is due to drought and a host of other factors driving up the cost of raising cattle. As the value of each head soars, so does the business case for using cellular and GNSS to monitor their location and health.
Livestock monitoring isn’t a new smart agriculture application, but its use cases and technologies are continually evolving and expanding. One example is virtual fences, where collars use sound and mild electrical pulses to herd cattle, sheep, goats, and other grazing livestock around pastures. This has several benefits, all of which scale up with larger herds:
- Ranchers can move herds remotely. This reduces labor, fuel, and other overhead costs associated with manual herding.
- Less money spent building and maintaining physical fences.
- Greater protection against overgrazing and the problems it causes, such as soil erosion, increased weeds, and the expense of supplemental nutrition and reseeding.
Producers also can leverage virtual fences to meet growing consumer demand for meat and milk from free-range livestock. “The observed trends are mainly related to the conviction of the higher nutritional value of such products and better welfare and environmental standards compared to raw materials and products obtained from animals reared in intensive production systems,” researchers explain in Virtual Fencing Technology for Cattle Management in the Pasture Feeding System—A Review.
The cost of implementing a virtual fence depends on the sizes of the herd and the ranch.
“Total first-year costs of adopting virtual fence technology are estimated to range from around $175 per cow to roughly $400 per cow depending on the vendor and herd size,” according to University of Arizona researchers. “Beyond the first year, costs include annual fees and ongoing labor costs of operating the system. Costs for year two and beyond range from around $80 per cow to $130 per cow depending on the vendor and herd size.”
Another factor is whether the system uses only public cellular infrastructure or needs private base stations to fill coverage gaps. The latter is an additional expense but could be spread across multiple producers, such as members of an agriculture co-op.
A new option is Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs), whose satellites are integrated with terrestrial public cellular networks to plug coverage holes. NTNs are enabling new IoT use cases that were previously impractical or too costly with traditional standalone satellite services. (For more details, see “Introduction to Non-Terrestrial Networks.”)
NTNs are a good fit for a wide variety of smart agriculture IoT applications, such as sensors for reporting soil temperature and moisture, autonomous tractors, and irrigation controllers. If a producer uses NTNs for one or more of those applications, then adding virtual fences becomes an incremental opex cost because it’s not the only application using the NTN service. (For more insights and examples, see “Fertile Ground: Non-Terrestrial Networks for Agriculture.”)
Choosing Livestock-Grade Cellular and GNSS Antennas
Whether they’re used for virtual fences or additional use cases, too, livestock collars need to balance reliability and granularity with battery life. Those requirements highlight the importance of choosing the right antenna systems.
For the GNSS antenna, focus on chips and patches. Read “Chip or Patch? How to Choose the Right Type of GNSS Antenna” to understand the top considerations. And for a deeper dive into aspects such as PCB placement and using filters to protect against cellular interference, download our comprehensive guide to GNSS antenna integration “Your GNSS Antenna Is Only as Good as Its Integration. Here’s How to Get It Right.”
For the cellular antenna, two good options are Taoglas’ surface-mount (SMT) antennas and the Taoglas FXUB63, which supports all 4G and 5G bands between 600 MHz and 6 GHz spectrum. The FXUB63 simplifies the collar’s design and expands its addressable market because only one antenna is necessary to connect to virtually any mobile operator and NTN provider.
Whether it’s for cellular or GNSS, sometimes a custom antenna is necessary to meet unique requirements for size, shape, performance, and other key attributes. The Taoglas CSA.50 Custom Antenna Design service uses those device OEM specs to develop and then test different antenna designs, technologies, topologies, materials, and locations to identify the optimal solution.
Going custom doesn’t mean delaying the livestock collar’s time to market. The entire CSA.50 process — which includes providing five physical samples for the OEM to test internally — typically takes just six to eight weeks.
