“Eyes-in-the-Field” for Western Livestock Growers

Livestock drinking water tanks and troughs dot the western landscape but few people outside of the livestock growers consider how valuable they are to the health and welfare of the millions of livestock scattered across miles of remote, dry, country. If there is a power outage, a pump failure, or a broken pipe-line, water tanks can go dry and livestock will perish, costing the livestock growers thousands of dollars. To make sure that their livestock have water to drink, many livestock growers spend hours each week making long trips over rough roads to inspect their water systems.

To aid the ranching community, the NRCS approached Frontier Precision partner, In-Situ, about a way to remotely monitor livestock drinking water tank levels and make this data available to the rancher on a computer or smart-phone. Two test systems were installed, one with a cellular phone and the other using an Iridium satellite modem. These test systems have been in place for a year making the data available on In-Situ’s HydroVu data hosting network. One rancher comments that he can now check his water tank level while enjoying his morning coffee. Gone are the days of making hours long trips to visit these remote sites and worries about livestock having drinking water.

The installed systems can include either an In-Situ LevelTroll or RuggedTroll combined with a Tube300R cellular transmitter or TrollLink 201 Iridium satellite transmitter. The LevelTroll and RuggedTrolls are all-in-one”, self-contained water-level sensors and dataloggers with a long-life, lithium battery. These are connected to the remote telemetry transmitter which sends the data to a remote server at a user-specified interval. The data is made available to the user through the In-Situ HydroVu data hosting software. The user can see the last transmitted water level and can view historical data in a graphical or tabular format over a user-specified time- period such as the last week or month.

Frontier Precision can provide tank level monitoring systems with remote telemetry and data hosting as well as tank level monitoring with automatic pump-control. A complete system including all of the hardware with one-year of cellular data hosting can be purchased for under $2200.00.

Frontier Precision hosted a webinar on this application on December 7th at 10:00 am MST.

View Recorded Webinar Here

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