Wi-Fi at Work in Agribusiness

California’s Faria Farms is using a wireless mesh network to monitor five separate facilities in the Central Valley.

The California-based dairy, Faria Farms, whose more than 4,000 cows produce over 26,000 gallons of milk a day on five separate farms, recently installed an extensive wireless video surveillance system, deployed by Valley Ag Software, using wireless mesh networking equipment from Firetide and cameras from Axis Communications.

Valley Ag Software’s Sean Woods says his company’s line of work can sometimes present a unique challenge. “I go and meet with a lot of different technology companies, and you’d be surprised how many people go, ‘Agriculture? Cows?’” he says. “They seem shocked that there’s this kind of technology in agriculture—but there is.”

The point, Woods says, is that agriculture is just as viable a vertical market as, say, healthcare or municipal security. “Agriculture is getting more and more technically advanced…video surveillance, networking, and multi-facility connectivity will be more and more commonplace as we go down the road,” he says.

The Faria Farms deployment, which Woods says took about a week to install, uses six outdoor Firetide HotPort 6202 nodes and one indoor 6201 node at the main office—along with five Axis 233D network dome cameras, two Axis 211 fixed cameras, and two Axis 221 fixed cameras, controlled using Axis Camera Station 3 video management software.

Reliability and performance

Woods says Valley Ag made the switch to Firetide equipment relatively recently. When the company ran Firetide units in their lab alongside equipment from their previous provider, he says, they were able to have six cameras running on the Firetide equipment with no problems, with two streams running from each—while the other gear maxed out at four cameras.

The Faria system allows a user to pan, tilt, and zoom each camera remotely, enabling the owners to keep an eye on all five farms from a central location. “The system helps us in so many ways I can’t imagine going without it—and we’re planning on adding more cameras soon,” says farm owner Rick Faria.

Firetide marketing communications manager Ksenia Coffman says that while video surveillance in and of itself is already relatively common in dairies, this deployment presented a unique challenge in terms of the number of farms involved and the fact that the facilities themselves are about two to four miles apart.

To ensure the reliability of the network, Woods says, the company set up a circular mesh connecting all of the farms. “We wound up at the main office with two entry points into that mesh, so anywhere in that link can go down and everything still has a way back to the main office,” he says.

And the installation itself, Woods says, was relatively straightforward. “Luckily, we’re on fairly flat land here in the Central Valley and there’s not a lot of trees, just mostly farmland, so line of sight wasn’t too big of an issue… except for a big silo on someone else’s property—but we moved around that, and made it happen,” he says.

Empowering dairy farmers

While the cameras help with security by monitoring access to the farms themselves, Woods says the real focus of the deployment was facility management—ensuring that proper practices are followed in all locations. Previously, the only way Faria had of doing so was simply to have a herdsman personally watching over each facility.

Now, Wood says, Faria can check in on any of his farms at any time. “Rick, because his house is actually part of the mesh network, can sit at home and he can view the cameras,” he says. “And he can log into the time clock server, and he can also log into [our core software], DairyCOMP.”

Faria says a key catalyst for the deployment was the fact that a neighboring farmer was sued for labor violations—a video surveillance system, he notes, can effectively prevent frivolous lawsuits. “The $90,000 price tag for the system more than justifies itself, considering that’s roughly a judgment one can expect from a claim, let alone the time and lawyer costs involved,” he says.

And the deployment isn’t just about the video cameras. Other applications, Woods says, include everything from IP-based time clocks to future plans like networked milk meters. “And Faria, he’s set for all that stuff,” he says. “Five years from now, we can be putting new stuff in—and that network’s going to be in place and ready to go.”

Ultimately, Wood says, the system is really about enabling someone like Faria to have more control over his farm. “As some of these dairymen will tell you, ‘Two in the morning, I wake up thinking about something’—and he doesn’t have to jump up and go over to the office to do it,” he says. “So it gives the dairymen a little more breathing room to get stuff done in a day.”