Semtech has announced that ITK, a French supplier of IoT-based smart agriculture applications, has developed a new cattle health monitoring solution based on Semtech’s LoRa devices. The FarmLife smart agriculture service and its LoRa-enabled sensors detect cattle estrus, drive improved nutrition and predict the onset of disease to help ranchers better monitor their herd.
According to ITK, LoRa devices’ flexibility in deployment makes a key difference for connecting animals and offers the potential for a significant return on investment (ROI). ITK’s solution provides ranchers with tangible, actionable data on the health of their herd to remove variables from ranching and create productive, efficient and profitable ranches.
Offering a flexible solution for the smart agriculture vertical, Semtech’s LoRa devices create applications that help minimize waste, maximize yield, reduce expenses, and offer farms and ranches an opportunity to operate as efficiently as possible. ITK’s LoRa-based sensors deploy simply through a collar equipped to each animal. The collar is non-invasive and immediately begins reporting data on the cow’s health upon deployment. Ranchers monitor their herd from this unique LoRa-based device, which provides the benefits of four value added services: Heat’Live for heat detection, Feed’Live for nutrition optimization, Time’Live for animal welfare, and Vel’Live for calving detection. These services are available through ITK’s FarmLife Cloud platform. In total, deploying ITK’s solution costs less than 30€ per animal annually.
In addition to the 300,000 cows already monitored in Europe, approximately 20 ranches have deployed ITK’s FarmLife platform in North America, connecting cows to the Cloud through network connectivity from X-TELIA, a leading Canadian network provider. Following this initial deployment, farmers claimed they received an ROI in less than a year through an increase in ranch productivity and efficiency. X-TELIA and ITK plan to continue the rollout of this smart agriculture solution in the Canadian market, adding ITK’s San’Phone cattle health monitoring service and its Thermo-bolus sensor to connect up to 2.4 million cows in the coming months.
Semtech | www.semtech.com