Semtech and itk Create Healthy and Productive Ranches with LoRa® Devices

With an investment of less than 30€ annually per animal, ranchers have experienced return on investment in less than a year.

Semtech Corporation announced that itk, a leading French supplier of Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart agriculture applications, has developed a new cattle health monitoring solution based on Semtech’s LoRa® devices.

The FarmLife® smart agriculture service and its LoRa-enabled sensors detect cattle estrus, drive improved nutrition and predict the onset of disease to help ranchers better monitor their herd.

“Semtech’s LoRa devices provided the ideal platform on which to develop our cattle monitoring solutions,” said Eric Jallas, CEO at itk. “The IoT technology’s proven advantages for smart agriculture, including long range communication and ultra-low power consumption, were key characteristics for itk to develop its cattle monitoring sensors. LoRa devices’ flexibility in deployment makes a key difference for connecting animals and offers the potential for a significant return on investment (ROI). Our unique solution provides ranchers with tangible, actionable data on the health of their herd to remove variables from ranching and create productive, efficient and profitable ranches.”

Offering a flexible solution for the smart agriculture vertical, Semtech’s LoRa devices create applications that help minimize waste, maximize yield, reduce expenses, and offer farms and ranches an opportunity to operate as efficiently as possible.

itk’s LoRa-based sensors deploy simply through a collar equipped to each animal. The collar is non-invasive and immediately begins reporting data on the cow’s health upon deployment. Ranchers monitor their herd from this unique LoRa-based device, which provides the benefits of four value added services: Heat’Live® for heat detection, Feed’Live® for nutrition optimization, Time’Live® for animal welfare, and Vel’Live® for calving detection. These services are available through itk’s FarmLife Cloud platform. In total, deploying itk’s solution costs less than 30€ per animal annually.

In addition to the 300,000 cows already monitored in Europe, approximately 20 ranches have deployed itk’s FarmLife platform in North America, connecting cows to the Cloud through network connectivity from X-TELIA, a leading Canadian network provider. Following this initial deployment, farmers claimed they received an ROI in less than a year through an increase in ranch productivity and efficiency. X-TELIA and itk plan to continue the rollout of this smart agriculture solution in the Canadian market, adding itk’s San’Phone® cattle health monitoring service and its Thermo-bolus sensor to connect up to 2.4 million cows in the coming months.

“From measuring environmental conditions that influence crop production to tracking livestock health indicators, LoRa devices for smart agriculture enable efficiencies that reduce environmental impact, maximize yield and minimize expenses,” said Marc Pegulu, Vice President of IoT for Semtech’s Wireless and Sensing Products Group.

“With LoRa, ranchers are empowered knowing that their animals are being monitored more accurately and efficiently than before. itk’s LoRa-based cattle sensor and the Thermo-bolus provide real-time data to enable ranches to operate as healthily and productively as possible.”

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