Intelligent Livestock Feeding System by Means of Silos with IoT Technology

Intelligent agriculture has the potential of increasing sustainability and productivity in the field of agriculture and livestock, through efficient and precise use of resources. Thus, this technology gives the possibility of promoting growth in developing countries through automation and control of repetitive farming activities, such as monitoring the level of water and feed in the feeders, which allows farmers to save time. However, the implementation of an automatic feed and water level control system in a livestock enclosure requires a large investment in silo scales, which may be too expensive for an SME. Thanks to the evolution of IoT devices, it is possible to reduce the cost of this implementation while integrating new functionalities and interactions through the interconnection of devices with cloud solutions. This work presents a new system that allows to monitor the quantity and quality of food and water in a silo by estimating volume in real time. Moreover, it has an additional functionality; temperature and humidity estimation in a livestock enclosure. The hardware system will be managed by a multi-agent system in charge of the processes of managing the data, managing the quantity of food and water supplied to each feeder. The use of a multi-agent architecture allows for the development of a distributed solution that provides great possibilities for future analysis, for example through a massive data analysis. The case study results demonstrate the effectiveness of the system, it has provided the ideal amount of feed and water to the animals, controlling the quality of grain and water, reducing the number of colics caused by overfeeding. In addition, the time the farmer must spend on the farm reduces considerably.