Watching Lambing live on the telly now I’m struck with how many ways inventions could make things better.
It also makes me think of many things that people may think of but would actually make things worse… when we’re talking about highly skilled farmers and their animals, they are often much better at many tasks than tech can hope to be and I hope I don’t stray into this category there.
My idea for this evening was that the tags on the sheep should all have a low power bluetooth transmitter in them.
Then when the sheep are led to graze on common land, 1 in say 100 sheep can be fitted with a receiver (or all the farmers can co-op to buy receivers for some trees) which can then let them know where most of the sheep are or have been… either with a built in mobile phone style device or as mobile signal will be limited, with a certain amount of memory which is later downloaded, or a bit of both.
The farmers can have NFC receivers on their phones so when traveling on their quads to herd the sheep, they know which sheep are in range and can also tell the sheep’s history.
The sorting process can then be mostly automated too with a sensor in the gate.
If there are many receiver sheep in the area, a lot of sheep movements can then be triangulated and look for problems… Although I think this is byproduct information that may or may not be that useful
Tups can also be fitted with a receiver and um.. motion sensor which can then log what actions with which sheep.
Lambing Live is on the BBC all week so I’m sure I’ll be thinking of something else before the week is through.
Quick unrelated note: Auto-updating has just gone live on http://eb.am which is great fun!
