Livestock farmers may lose up to 10% of their cattle annually and currently they do not have the appropriate tool to avoid it happening over and over again. They also need to decrease their operating costs (fuel, time, etc.) and improve the calving rate of their herd. Society demands more knowledge about the food products they consume and authorities must ensure that high conditions of such food products are guaranteed and met by suppliers.
STEPLA is a service platform consisting of wearables and software modules developed by SensoWave and with the support of the FIWARE accelerator, SmartAgriFood. The idea came from the need for one of the founders to avoid animal losses in livestock, which was on the verge of bankrupting his family business. The product is the only Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that offers location, monitoring, and traceability capabilities for real-time livestock individual location and monitoring.
By using sigfox technology, STEPLA monitors the animals´ condition in real-time, detecting anomalies and facilitating farm management. The solution employs several FIWARE enablers which provide a simple yet powerful set of API´s. It uses several IoT agents which gathers information from the various sensors and relays it to the Orion Context Broker which essentially manages the influx of data. The Cosmos GE analyses the data from farms and authorities in order to discover new patterns and deploy improved services. STEPLA integrates stakeholders such as veterinarians, suppliers, insurance companies, authorities, consumers, and other elements within the farming distribution chain.
More than 50 livestock farms are using the pre commercial version of STEPLA, not just in Spain but also Ireland, France, Italy, Czech Republic and Australia and shortly the first wearables will be deployed in Peru.
SensoWave, with the support of the SME Instrument, now aims to further scale up, test in several environments, and to include applications for other livestock: pigs, sheep/goats, and horses. The primary goal of STEPLA+ is: to cut down farmer production costs, increase farm profitability, improve animals’ welfare, reducing environmental impact of livestock activities, and enabling an intelligent tracing system for animals and fodder eaten providing truthful information to worldwide consumers.
Stepla aims to be the leading provider of wearables and services associated in livestock farms globally, ultimately benefiting not only the farmers and animals through better welfare and reduced costs but for the food suppliers, consumers and authorities, where truthful product information is provided and infected meat reaching the food chain is avoided through, effectively a pandemic contention tool, permitting early detection of disease and illness.
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