Making Hay with RFID

Farming includes a wide spectrum of agricultural activities. At one end is the subsistence farmer, who farms a small area with limited resources.  At the other end is commercial and industrial agriculture farming which involves large fields, large numbers of animals, and a high level of mechanization and efficiency.  While farming has been around for a long time (reportedly since 8000 BC!), the ways in which land is farmed and is constantly evolving.  As a result, each acre farmed is producing more food for more people – an important trend given the world’s population growth trends.

When you think of RFID and sensors being used in the agriculture and farming industries, tracking livestock with low frequency (LF) RFID tags to automate processes like feeding, weighing, and disease management may come to mind.  Or, maybe using RFID and sensors for food security and cold chain systems.  But hey, what about automating hay harvesting?

Harvesting Hay with RFID

Harvesting hay is a very precise process with a very large impact on the success of a farm’s feeding program.  Not only do livestock get nourishment from eating hay, but farmers who harvest hay need it to be top quality in order to sell it for a good price.  Hay is at its prime during a specific one week period during its maturation.  Passed that point, it becomes coarse and dry and much of its nutritional value has faded. Once the hay is cut, it then has to be dried and then baled. Tracking the moisture levels in bales is one of the most important aspects of the entire hay baling process.  A bale with a moisture content above 20% is at risk for spontaneous combustion due to elevated heat levels during its respiration process.  Any bale harvested below 12% has experienced field losses, leading to low feeding value and yield losses.

As with any job or process, not everything always goes perfectly and in the business of hay harvesting, the quality of some bales turn out to be better than others.  Cows’ multiple stomachs can properly digest hay at many different qualities - even moldy. But, the production of milk and meat from cows fed high quality hay is significantly higher than those fed a lower quality.  Other animals such as horses are at a higher risk of getting sick from eating bad hay – elevating the need for growers to produce high quality hay for these species.

What was once managed manually can now be done much more efficiently with newer technology and machinery.  Advances in baling equipment have led to the production of large square bales that have increased field harvesting capacities and mechanized handling and feeding.  Bales can now be created by one tractor that cuts and rolls it in one step.  Conditioners are available to speed up the drying process and now – believe it or not - RFID tags are being incorporated to monitor every detail about each individual bale.

In the Field with Harvest Tec

ThingMagic partner Harvest Tec offers a useful RFID Bale Identification Systems add-on for three popular hay baler machines: AGCO, New Holland, and Case IH.  Harvest Tec chose to develop RFID-enabled solutions because of the technology’s widespread use across many industries and low cost per tag.  In their solution, as the bales are leaving the tractor a thin RFID tag is wrapped around one of the twine holding the hay together.  On this small tag, all of the data essential for farmers is stored.  With either a handheld or tractor mounted reader anyone can see which field the hay came from, on what date it was harvested, average and high moisture levels, temperature, weight, amount of preservatives used, latitude and longitude of the position the bale was harvested from, and a unique ID number.  With this valuable information, farmers can distribute hay to their livestock and ensure it is of consistent quality.

The rest of the hay can be sold for a higher price since the buyer knows exactly how nutritious each bale is.  Bales with too much moisture or mold can be removed from a stack so they don’t contaminate the rest of the bales.  These bales can then be efficiently used to feed cows or other uses where top quality is not a priority.

Harvest Tec has produced a few cool videos and have them posted on their website.  Check them out and let us know about other areas of the agriculture and farming industries that you feel can benefit from the use RFID.

"RFID is the missing link between online information and the real world” - Andrew Lippman, Media Lab associate director and head, Viral Communications group.

Driven in part by the staggering adoption rates of mobile devices and their corresponding ‘apps’ over the last few years, we have become increasingly reliant on digital information for nearly every aspect of our lives.  This demand is driving new choices for how we access and manage digital information beyond mobile devices, to all kind of interesting applications in the PC, TV, and signage markets.

Take interactive touch screens and digital ‘smart’ signs for example.  For years, retailers, entertainment venues, and others have been using banks of TV screens and large displays to broadcast images and marketing messages in an effort to expand the delivery of their product information.  In January 2010, Intel and Microsoft announced they were collaborating to take displays to the next level by developing smart sign technology that would offer interactivity to shoppers and help brick and mortar retailers customize their promotions in order to better compete with web-based retail. 

The solution proposed by Intel & Microsoft uses cameras to recognize whether the viewer is male or female and then presents offers for products that are more likely to appeal to them.  But what if you allowed the display to know more about you?  What if the display could recognize who you were, what your personal preferences were, and then serve up an individualized experience? 

This type of innovation is being explored at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts where low-cost technologies such as RFID and sensors are being used to create seamless and pervasive ways for us to interact with information and with each other. Read the ThingMagic announcement.

To support its own internal events and to assist students and faculty with distributing and accessing information about its groups and projects, the Media Lab has deployed a network of presence-based, touch-sensitive information displays.  Visitor presence - sensed through the integration of RFID readers into each display and RFID badges worn by guests - automates the creation of personal profiles, enables personalized content delivery and group information sharing, and delivers aggregated location and activity data to centralized display screens so individuals can track the progress of their visit.  Each visitor’s portfolio is saved and can be accessed online at a later date.

Of course, securing personal data is required for these types of solutions to be adopted broadly outside of closed-loop applications, especially in markets such as retail.  For industries that already operate largely on an opt-in basis however – like conferences, events, museums, libraries, and theme parks – these solutions can offer a significantly enhanced customer experience.  Large & small enterprises, hospitals, and, of course, schools and universities are also potential early adopters, as they can benefit tremendously from making information more accessible, interactive – and customized.

Share your thoughts about the evolution of smart signs.  Where will they work?  Where won’t they work?  How are personal data security issues best addressed?

How RFID and Sensing Is Automating Identification, Data Collection, and Location Systems

The history of communications has progressed from human/human through human/machine to machine/machine interchange. The long evolution of each of these modalities has undeniably had a profound impact on human civilization. The last frontier in this saga is to connect the physical world to the world of machines.  Physical objects coupled with a myriad of radio technologies are driving this revolution. For instance, a modern multi-band mobile phone contains at least eight different radios —  receiving  location information from GPS satellites 26 kilometers above the earth to as close as a Bluetooth headset in your ear 1 meter away - all within the same personal communicator. 

In the past 10 years, we've gone from a world in which very few knew of RFID, to one in which the hype of the technology exceeded practical adoption rates, to today, where RFIDS is found in automated data collection, identification, and location systems worldwide. There are many types of RFIDS technologies. From Active RFIDS to ZigBee, each offers benefits across a variety of parameters including performance, standards maturity, and complementary hardware components and software applications. Solutions enabled by these technologies are addressing familiar needs across many industries including locating high-value assets in hospitals, improving item level inventory in retail stores, and tracking vehicles and goods in transit to improve supply chain management. Much more intriguing though, are the growing number of innovative solutions where users and consumers can naturally interact with RFIDS and where the technology is so integrated and transparent that it disappears into its environment.

Users of RFIDS technology may not know or even care about the enabling technology in the product or solution they are using, but understand that their professional and personal lives can benefit tremendously by experiencing its benefits. Consider a cancer patient whose treatment experience is enhanced because the environment (temperature, lighting, music, etc) changes to their liking by simply walking through the hospital door. Or a construction worker who can make sure he has all of his tools in his work truck by using an in-dash tool tracking application. Or an event participant who can manage their on-site and post-event activities through a personalized interactive information network. Each of these is an example of how new innovative solutions can deliver a valuable and unique user experience by processing data and automating processes in ways that could not be done economically or aesthetically without RFIDS.

While exploring these applications of RFIDS it is also worth reviewing advances in the enabling technology itself. Of all RFIDS technologies available, the performance of Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Passive RFIDS (860 to 960 MHz frequency range) is advancing phenomenally. Consider the following: The read range of passive UHF RFIDS tags has quadrupled in past 3 years, meaning that UHF devices can now “see” objects at distances from millimeters to tens of meters. Read rates have increased from 200 to 1200 tags per second and read accuracy is near 100%. The cost of Passive RFIDS tags has decreased by a factor of 5 over the same period. Functionality is also expanding. In addition to reading a unique ID, UHF devices can remotely query the state, e.g., temperature of an object, determine its direction of travel and velocity, and can even turn on and off devices connected to the tag.

Regardless of the type of RFIDS you may be exploring, one thing is certain - the broad adoption of all types of RFIDS today shows that the much-heralded promise of the technology goes far beyond the supply chain focus that generated so much hype in the last decade – leading us to the next revolution in wireless and mobility applications.

September 2010 marks the 10 year anniversary of the founding of ThingMagic and as we reflect on the significant advances in RFIDS technology over the last decade, we at ThingMagic are equally excited about what the next decade holds. Since the release of ThingMagic’s first products, RFIDS technology has been able to take advantage of the incredible amount of Moore’s law expansion in the embedded world. What previously required thousands of components to implement is now available in a single chip, allowing for the design of products today that are higher performing, ten times cheaper, and one hundred times smaller than the products we brought to market ten years ago.

At ThingMagic, we believe that these advances in passive wireless ID and sensing technologies represent an important next step toward a multi-scale wireless world, significantly and positively impacting a wide array of end-market applications including mobile computing, asset tracking, telematics, and security.  To illustrate this, we plan to highlight a different application each business day for the next 100 days. We will be doing so on this blog and through a new page on our Web site. We also plan to use Twitter to foster and participate in an active dialogue as these applications are revealed.  You can participate in this discussion by following the hashtag #RFID100 on Twitter.

What is your vision of how radio frequency identification will impact our world?  What will the leading uses of RFIDS be in the next 10 years? How will we benefit from smart objects that recognize and respond to one another and to the world around them?

ThingMagic is the Engine in RFID® For more examples, follow ThingMagic’s 100 Uses of RFID campaign to learn about innovative ways in which RFIDS is being used to automate data collection, identification, and location systems worldwide.  Visit our 100 Uses of RFID webpage and join the discussion on Twitter using the hashtag #RFID100.

As the Associated Press article, E. coli outbreak sickens 19 people in 3 states points out, local authorities had been investigating the outbreak for several weeks.  In addition to the life threatening illnesses and costly investigations that could have be avoided, imagine how much faster the contaminated produce could have been identified and removed from the retail supply chain by using data generated by RFID and sensors.

There are plenty of examples of passive RFID being used to drive efficiencies into the produce supply chain. There is now an incredible opportunity, if not a responsibility, for growers, distributors and retailers to expand their use of technology, not just to enhance efficiencies, but to create value for their customers in ways that promote health and safety.

One such innovation was recently presented to an audience at RFID Journal LIVE! 2010 and covered by RFID Journal in an article RFID Tracks Leafy Greens in Arizona.  As detailed, researchers at the University of Arizona's School of Plant Sciences are developing a system that uses RFID and GPS to allow farmers and retailers to trace lettuce through the supply chain while offering farmers a better view into the productivity of their fields.

Similarly, ThingMagic is working with several partners in agriculture related markets, focused on developing and implementing solutions that can improve the quality and safety of goods moving through supply and cold chains.

If you have a food safety project that could benefit from our full line of embedded RFID, fixed RFID reader and embedded active sensor R&D program, please let us know.

Smart products fuse together electronics, software, sensors and network connections to provide a wide range of new capabilities. Smart objects can:

• Measure, sense, see and report on their surroundings
• Respond to changes in their environment
• Interact with other smart objects, people, and IT systems in entirely new ways
• Adapt to the unique needs of businesses and people

From trucks that can track what’s in them to critical care medical devices that know exactly where they are in crowded hospitals, smart objects are changing how we build and use products.

Microsoft, IBM and Google all recognize the growing role smart objects are playing in our lives. Microsoft’s Vision for 2019 video shows a world of flexible displays, touch screens and seamless data integration across smart objects that recognize and respond to one another and to the world around them.

Google talks about the Next Internet being a place where connected smart objects constantly exchange information and adjust and act based on the needs of the user.

IBM’s view is "The planet will be instrumented, interconnected, intelligent."

Many smart objects of the near future will comprise one or more wireless technologies to connect their state to the internet. At ThingMagic, we believe that ultimately, passive and semi-passive RFID will define the largest segment of this -- because these radios do not require batteries or can parasitically draw power from their environment -- all objects which do not have sources of power (the majority of objects humans create) have the potential to be tagged.

We are inventing and producing technology that helps give smart objects their intelligence. Our RFID readers, for example, act analogously to a WiFi router for laptops and smartphones, by connecting objects to the network and provide the ability to identify and track assets. And, in our labs, we are working on sensor technologies that will give objects the ability to analyze and respond to their environment without human intervention.

Smart objects can change the world for the better. Focusing of our food supply for a moment, think of the truck that knows when spinach has been contaminated by E. coli even before it arrives at the next distribution point. In the home, people have spoken for many years about the milk telling your fridge to re-order itself due to spoilage or short supply. We are finally at a cusp in time where this could be possible AND economically feasible.

It is an exciting vision. And a vision that we are proud and excited to be part of.

The Christian Science Monitor has a great article on networked outdoor sensors. The article focuses on the use of sensors to measure soil moisture levels at Camalie Vineyards in California.

As the article points out, wireless sensors are increasingly being used outdoors. Common applications include keeping track of temperatures, moisture levels and other environmental factors for a variety of high value crops including fruits, nuts and nursery plants.

Addressing similar market needs, ThingMagic builds rugged RFID readers designed for use in harsh environments. Our readers are being used to monitor the moisture content in bales of hay, keep track of cars and trucks in maintenance yards, track tools at work sites, monitor temperatures in fresh produce cold chains and a wide variety of other outdoor applications.

Passive RFID is well suited for these applications: passive RFID tags are inexpensive to buy, encode and deploy; they also do not require their own source of power; RFID readers come in a variety of economical form factors, including handheld and mobile versions. This combination makes it easy to deploy the system in almost any outdoor situation.

RFID readers are also designed to be network ready and fit into existing IT infrastructures, or simply move the sensor data to PCs or Internet applications.

ThingMagic has an active sensor R&D program and is working with several partners on commercial sensor products. More on this in coming months.

IBM's new Building a Smarter Planet blog has an interesting video describing how interconnected intelligent systems are being used to build a smarter planet.

IBM is defining the smarter planet as "intelligent infrastructure for our energy grids, transportation system, food supply and healthcare networks... It is also about trillions of devices and objects connecting to the Internet and changing the way billions of people live and work.'

The video describes how RFID will be used across the food chain to insure safety and reduce waste and loss.

Today, ThingMagic and several of our business partners are working on making our global food chain more secure, safe and efficient.

One example is the cold chain, where our USB Reader is being used to read temperature sensors made by Infratab Corporation. The combination of Infratab sensors and ThingMagic readers provide producers of perishable foods and products information and insights on the quality of their cold chains.

Infratab is offering a cold chain starter kit – including the ThingMagic USB Reader - now through March.