ABSTRACT

As the nation is emphasizing on the development of the economy with agriculture as an attendant alternative to the existing oil driven economy, it has become imperative to mechanize agriculture. This work is centered on livestock. Research has shown that livestock in the farm are mostly affected by diseases and that the proximity between animals and humans has made the latter more vulnerable to infectious diseases of animals. These various diseases are so tormenting that they kill livestock quickly and in large number, thereby increasing the cost of livestock farming. Even with the proliferation of modern sensing devices, design concepts and scientific propositions that are in abundance. However, building a functional as well as cost effective miniature device that is capable of remotely detecting cattle’s health status and location in real-time has been quite challenging. In view of this, this work proposes an Internet of Things cum Near Field Communication (NFC) system for monitoring and tracking the health status as well as the location of any cattle by using sensors, and Global Positioning System (GPS) module respectively. The system implementation was carried out using the software program to drive the hardware system. The design is an embedded application which forms unit integration with various sensors such as temperature sensor, pulse rate sensor, humidity sensor, and GPS location sensor interfaced to the NodeMCU microcontroller with embedded ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip. This Wi-Fi chip serves as an Internet of Things (IoT) gateway for sending data to a remote server. Farmers get cows’ health status report in real time either online or on their mobile phones in form of Short Messaging Service (SMS), so that an intelligent monitoring is achieved by just a click on the hyperlinked SMS to triangulate the position of cattle on the Google map. The test carried out on the system developed shows that the prototype is flexible, reliable and capable of monitoring cattle remotely. The system can also be deployed in a farm settlement with any kind of cattle production system in use because of its compact design, affordability, and complementary support for areas of poor network infrastructure. The system developed will improve modern ranching and which will help the national polity as the issue of Fulani herdsmen will be curbed.