Smart E-Tags Look To Increase Productivity, Reduce Costs, Increas

Smart e-tags are an emerging technology in the beef cattle industry. Mark Trotter, a professor of precision livestock management at Central Queensland University in Australia, has been researching smart e-tags. He spoke about the technology at the recent Oklahoma Beef Cattle Summit.

“I guess there's an emerging technology coming into the beef industry, which is this on-animal census or smart ear tags, as people call them," Trotter noted. "There's starting to be a lot of interest from producers in putting these tags out on cattle and exploring how we can use them and what value they might bring to our industry. So, I'm over visiting from Australia looking at how we take data off these smart ear tags and turn it into meaningful information for a rancher so that they can make a decision that'll either increase productivity or reduce costs or increase sustainability?”

Trotter said the smart tags will offer producers a world of information.

“There is a whole range of different applications that are going to fall out of this particular technology, everything from basic stuff, just knowing that your cows are in the paddock that you put them in, knowing that they're not on the back of a truck going down the highway, maybe somebody's trying to steal your cattle. And then there's a whole range of other more advanced applications. So, you can start by looking at the data that comes off these smart tags, we can start to interpret key behaviors," he said. "Things like when a cow's calving. Some of the really interesting things that are emerging are around looking at how the animals' behavior changes in relation to the pasture that's available to them. So, as they start to run out of grass, or the quality of that pasture changes and starts to degrade, we're seeing behavior changes that will alert us to either maybe move them from another pasture or put supplement out.”

Trotter pointed out there are many different tags available for producers.

“There's a range of different commercial companies out there providing these sorts of devices. It's still early days, we say, so it's not a mature technology. I always make the analogy. It's a little bit like today. We have an iPhone. We're walking around with that, but maybe 20 years ago, we had the brick phone sort of thing. So, we're in that early stage of commercialization, but you can go out and buy that technology now, and there are certainly some specific differences between the manufacturers and the commercial developers of this. The different tags have different capabilities.”

He stressed it’s important to research what’s out there to find the right tag for your operation.

"Some of the simple stuff is that some of the tags collect different sorts of data at different rates, and so some of the smart tags provide GPS location every half an hour, or some provide that only every six hours, depending on what you want to know that may be more or less important to you," Trotter said. "The behavior senses in these tags are quite different, so some of them can give you more accurate data on key behaviors like rumination and resting or grazing, and depending on the questions that you have for your particular operation, one of those will suit you better.”

The tags can send information to your computer or smartphone as well.

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