KEEPING TRACK OF LIVESTOCK

Thank you for your excellent magazine. Inspired by some of your articles in the past, we now live in a fully solar-powered house, totally off grid. We use a Phantom 4 drone, about which we learnt through your magazine. We use it to patrol our farm’s borders as well as to monitor our cattle. We farm free range cattle on about 5 000 ha in the Windsorton area near Kimberley.

We urgently need expert advice from your readers or other authorities or both. Our cattle are sometimes brutally slaughtered in inhumane ways or stolen. Unfortunately a highway runs through our farms and a lower-income rural settlement borders some of our land. Electric fencing does help to some extent, but it constantly comes under attack and even vehicles enter sometimes to steal cattle.

I read somewhere that a system exists whereby you can upload the exterior borders of your farm and be alerted when any unwanted cellphones cross these borders, but I can’t find any information about this. What we are after is a tracking system to be able to track every individual cow (about 800 cows) any time of the day or night. Existing systems, in which a collar is worn by some cows and has to be charged periodically, do not work since thieves isolate the animals with collars and target the rest. A tag system as implanted in fish, to monitor their immigration routes, would work fine, since thieves can’t see implantations. However, we can’t find any information about this.

Cellphone systems are available on about 70 per cent of the area, but it could be improved and expanded. I have a plan for the power supply for implants to be used, generated from the motion of a grazing animal.

Please contact me with any information or refer us to someone who can help. Any help will be deeply appreciated.