The US is the largest producer of beef in the world. Last year alone, it produces nearly 19% of the world’s beef.  This translate to about almost $90 billion in economic impact in the country. Aside from being a producer, the US also consumed more than 26 billion pounds of beef which have a retail value of the entire beef industry to more than $74B. For this level of production and consumption, each rancher in the US must produce a herd size of at least 100 or more to sustain the current demand. Ranchers often employ different techniques to minimized cattle losses by regularly monitoring their cattle’ health and well-being. With the recent advances in Global Positioning System (GPS) and the miniaturization of GPS module and internet of things (IoT) provide the medium of developing small tracking device for cattle.

This paper describes the development of cattle tracking device using GPS and IoT technology. The wireless tracking module may provide a framework that may be used for a large scale tracking system to help in monitoring cattle location and health. A prototype system for cattle tracking was developed. The system consists of a GPS Receiver module, Wifi, and sensors such as temperature and accelerometer+magnetometer. The GPS receiver module was tested to determine the minimum time to get a fixed signal. The shortest warm-up/cold start was determined to be around 32-35 sec. which was consistent with the datasheet of the receiver module. The tracking device was tested in a 3 sec. lag time and used ubidots cloud (cloud-based iot platform) for real-time data tracking. Three ubidots widgets were used, GPS data which was overlayed with a local Google map, data points, and graph style display for temperature data. The test under the latest prototype (version 6) produced real-time tracking.