Monitoring Feeding and Resting Pattern of Goats in Dairy Farm using Long-range RFID-based system

Real-time state of health of the livestock allows early diseases detection and interventions that will help avoid losses due to contagious diseases. This paper aims to describe the design and deployment of a long-range multiple-input Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) monitoring system that efficiently monitor real-time goat feeding and resting behaviour in the dairy farm by periodically collect the strength of the radio signal. The integrated system comprises of a passive RFID tag attached to the animal ear that communicates with UHF-based 4-port antenna RFID reader connected through radio frequency. The RFID reader is connected to a Raspberry-Pi3 that is used to process the received information from each tag and simultaneously transmit the data to the cloud server for analysis, visualization, and management. An interactive visualization via the website was then developed to continuously monitor the goat behaviour that helps early detection of diseases that can be detected through feeding behaviour. Results from this study show that the Received Signal Strength (RSSI) increased by 10dBm when the goat/tag closed (<1 metre) to the antenna. The result indicates that the deployed system able to successfully detect and monitor the feeding and resting behaviour of a dairy goat through the measurement of RSSI by each tag, as detected by the UHF-based 4-port antenna RFID reader.