Ceres Tag, an Australian company that has developed a smart ear tag for monitoring cattle, has formed a partnership with US based satellite operator Globalstar to conduct the final stages of large-scale commercial trials of its technology for the provenance and management of livestock.
Globalstar said the trials would be a significant scale extension of previous trials performed by Ceres Tag on 100 animals in North Queensland in early 2019. Once trials are complete, Ceres Tag expects to enter the market in the second half of 2020.
“The Globalstar and Ceres Tag partnership aims to improve efficiencies within the agriculture industry with benefits including livestock theft detection, better operational management for livestock location, improved provenance along the entire supply chain, improved detection and tracking for health and bio-security systems and more information on animal welfare,” Globalstar said.
Large scale trials planned
Ceres Tag said it would commence large scale trials in multiple environmental and climatic conditions to test and validate the operational proficiency of its livestock information platform, developed in collaboration with Meat & Livestock Australia, Queensland Government, CSIRO, James Cook University and Clandestine Design Group.
Ceres Tag is billed as “a next generation livestock information platform providing GPS location, provenance traceability and animal health and welfare information to improve data driven decisions for all stakeholders in the supply chain from paddock to processor and beyond.”
It is claimed to “decrease risk and increase transparency, fundamentally improving the detection of bio-security threats, financing of operations and insurance evaluation.”
Ceres Tag said the collaboration with Globalstar meant it would have no infrastructure set up time or costs and no ongoing subscription, just a one-off cost.
“The automating and democratising of data will assist on farm decision making, de-risking of the animal assets and the productivity uplift of the red meat industry in Australia and Globally,” Ceres Tag said.
“This data will also allow Ceres Tag to implement its machine learning and constantly improve the knowledge about the animals and eventually lead to assisting predictive evaluation through artificial intelligence.”
Previous trial plans
IoTAustralia reported in August 2018 that Ceres Tag was planning a trial on 500 cattle belonging to pastoral company Caason Group on its 400,000 hectare Aileron Pastoral Holdings property 135km north of Alice Springs.
Caason had become an investor in Ceres Tag and said a successful trial would trigger pre-commercial sales of thousands of Ceres Tag smart ear tags to Aileron Pastoral Holdings.
NLIS compliant
Ceres Tag founder and CEO, David Smith told IoTAustralia at the time that a key feature differentiating Ceres Tag from the many other cattle monitoring tags on the market or under development was that Ceres Tag was fully compliant with the National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) because its battery did not need replacing: the device is designed to last for the life of the beast to which it is attached.
