Smart farm computing systems for animal welfare monitoring

Smart sensing and computing have become important concepts in the last few years, creating opportunities in the new sector of smart agriculture. A few commercial smart agriculture systems have been introduced to this end, and albeit closed for experimentation, are paving the way for high-tech innovations for crop and livestock agriculture. In this paper, we focus on open and low-cost concepts for smart fog (edge) computing systems to create a smart farm animal welfare monitoring system. We develop an open source system that enables networking and computing of edge devices but also processing of data in a server - all being a connected system that we refer to as smart farm computing system. We propose to use Raspberry Pis as edge devices to monitor the animals and the farm environment, and we let the edge devices communicate with a local farm controller. The proposed farm computing system conceptually creates a fog computing layer and is further connected with cloud computing systems and a mobile application. We demonstrate that a low-cost and open computing and sensing system can effectively monitor multiple parameters related to animal welfare.