A cheap ear tag based tracking system that gives me real time locational awareness of where every cow in the herd is. Ideally low radiation, in other words not looking to put a GSM antenna on every animal
A mobile-friendly CRM for managing slaughter schedules and other livestock related stuff, that also incorporates something Asana-like for delegating and tracking farm tasks
A predictive analytics platform that takes data from ground-implanted sensors and weather services and does some analysis and gives me input on when we should plan to hay, which I will probably ignore anyway if we're being honest
I'll respond again if I think of anything else. Thank you for asking!
Regarding tracking, I work for rural electric utilities, and we're looking at LoRaWAN for tracking. $30 chip, 15+ mile range in rural environments. Plus it's low power (can run for a year on a battery), and it should meet your low radiation requirement since it doesn't transmit often. Just food for thought.
I don't think anyone has used the LoRa radio signals for triangulating position, but GPS chips are getting really cheap now too. I've been playing around with a $40 GPS module[1] that claims a pretty standard 3 meter accuracy.
A couple guys I went to high school with started a smart-ag business related to livestock tracking. Not sure how it relates to what you do, but seemed potentially related enough to pass along.
220 acres of pasture, contained by physical fencing (could be used to mount hardware but does not have 110VAC access). The pastures are interspersed within a larger area that also contains woods and swamps. The biggest pain point that good location tracking would solve for us would be the 6-8 calves we lose each year when they wander off and get hunted, killed and eaten by coyotes.
If I could a) get an app-driven alert when an animal leaves the area of pasture she's supposed to be in and b) have a mobile app that shows me where she is in relation to me so I can more easily find a 30-pound dark brown calf hunkered down in the woods at night, I'd be pretty stoked.
By the way, there is good LTE coverage where I am, and a lot of farms don't necessarily have great cell coverage, so bear that in mind if you're trying to get a feel for what the larger market might want. What I mean is, there's a mobile-only use case here and there's also a use case where you have a combination web-based UI (farmer's desktop) and an OEM handheld homing device for finding loose animals. If you want to get really fancy you do a Twilio integration and trigger a robocall to the farmer's landline so she wakes up in the middle of the night and logs into the web app to see what's going on.
