Mobile app for livestock producers

In my first blog post I discussed sensors and software and their usefulness in managing a confined livestock farm.  As great as sensors are that just sit and collect useful data on the site storing in the cloud with near real-time analytics (and that is very great) managers still need to collect data from the people working on the site each and every day.  Most systems require certain information to be recorded each day on the farm site.  Common pieces of data would include:

• mortalities for each group by type
• water readings from the meter 
• temperature from the controller (high and low) 
• feed deliveries
• medications
• feed estimates in the bin (this is perhaps a weekly or bi-weekly task)

Recording the information at the site is fraught with problems.  The information stays local.  Other people in the chain like vets, nutritionists, feed mill operators and animal owners experience delays in receiving the information.  What if the barn worker does chores from 6am-11am each day and the vet needs information at noon.  They have to wait until the barn worker can return to the site before they can get the information.  The exact timing of the information can be lost.  Employees can also sanitize the information before sending it out so that it doesn't make them look so bad.

Collecting data still comes down to how motivated the worker on the farm is, no different than when it is required to take the daily paper logs.  Collecting the data to the cloud will allow other people in the system to access information quickly and in a uniform manner.  Poor data collectors will quickly be identified with the alerting functions already available in Grovestreams.  The poor performers can be given measures to improve quickly.  

We created an app called FarmStreams to allow this information to be collected into the cloud for further processing or direct transfer into a larger enterprise level system.  The app can be found here for downloading: 

       Android http://tinyurl.com/mqgskr3

       Apple http://tinyurl.com/pclejlh 

Future blog posts will go into detail on each of the pieces of data that we collect, how we do it, why we do it and what it is used for.  Certain data is very cut and dry like mortalities.  Other data like medications is more abstract because they can be administered in so many different ways and in so many different units of measure.  We will work through how this is programmed in the app as we engage more producers with different needs.  Other data like temperature, water, and feed estimating are best collected with a sensor; but cost and connecting to cloud can be a constraint.