Australian IoT company Ceres Tag, developer of a smart ear tag for cattle, is to use Globalstar satellite services to provide communications with its tags.
The two companies have signed a commercial agreement that follows Ceres Tag partnering with Globalstar in November 2019 to trial the use of Globalstar for communication with its tags.
Globalstar will enable Ceres Tag to supply cattle owners an automated daily recording of information about their animals including their intake of pasture feed, which it says enable owners to determine feed efficiency, make genetic selection and manage greenhouse gas. Traceability, biosecurity, performance, health and welfare have never been under more scrutiny than they are now.
Ceres Tag CEO, David Smith, said: “With over one billion cattle in the world and a similar number of sheep and goats, we now have a low-cost limitless way to monitor our animals.” He added that the company was looking to introduce versions of Ceres Tag for wildlife and pets in 2022.
Globalstar CEO David Kagan said more than 80 percent of the world’s livestock were located in remote locations “where there is no infrastructure and where you may only see the animals once or twice a year.”
IoTAustralia had 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.
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.
These trials were followed by large scale trials in collaboration with CSIRO, Meat & Livestock Australia, Queensland Government. James Cook University and the Clandestine Design Group.
CSIRO’s Data61 announced the trials, saying they would be conducted across multiple environmental and climatic conditions to test and validate the operational proficiency of Ceres Tag’s complete livestock information platforms.
The commercial version of the cattle tag will be launched on May 1 at the Beef Australia Exhibition in Rockhampton Queensland and will be available for purchase and use worldwide from the Ceres Tag website. The company says it initial market focus will be Australia/New Zealand and North America. PWC has produced a report on the benefits of the Ceres Tag system.
