IoT Benefits for Livestock Farmers

The promise of benefit from instrumentation on the farm is substantial. However, simply connecting existing equipment to the network is not sufficient to achieve these benefits, as the resulting system is vulnerable to a multitude of reliability and security issues. We describe an approach to instrumenting livestock barns, describing some of the innovations that enable cost-efficiency, which explicitly requires paying attention to the integration of new instrumentation with existing equipment. We then articulate a range of benefits that accrue, both to the livestock and to the farmer. The result is a comprehensive understanding of barn operations, yielding many of the benefits one aspires to with IoT on the farm.