These Cows Will Text You When They’re in Heat

Every morning, Austin Knowles pulls on his rubber boots, dodges the manure in his farmyard, and opens the creaky wooden door of his 200-year-old barn on a hilltop in Worcestershire, 130 miles northwest of London. Inside, his dairy cows are busy uploading data to the cloud. Each animal has a half-pound sensor in her stomach, which is linked via Wi-Fi to a service that helps Knowles analyze the health and well-being of his herd. If an animal falls ill, the system e-mails the vet days before the cow is visibly sick. When one is about to go into heat, Knowles and his staff get a text message. “Cows are a lot of work,” the third-generation farmer says over tea at the rough-hewn wooden table in his kitchen. “The technology takes the edge off a bit.”

Knowles’s Hollings Hill is one of 350 farms in almost two dozen countries using technology from Austrian startup SmaXtec to monitor their livestock. It works like this: A weighted sensor about the size of a hot dog is inserted into a cow’s throat with a metal rod and lodges in the rumen, the first of a cow’s four stomachs. The device—equipped with a battery that lasts four years, about the length of a dairy cow’s productive life—transmits up-to-the-minute data such as the pH of her stomach, her temperature, how much she moves, and the amount of water she’s consumed. A base station in the barn picks up the signals, adds readings on ambient temperature and humidity, and then uploads all the information to the cloud.