Productivity factors and stricter quality requirements call for new innovations in animal husbandry. Traditionally these demands have been met by increasing the product unit's size and efficiency, as well as by acknowledging the possibilities embedded in enhanced feed and breeding. As human labor has become more expensive and the typical enterprise larger in the course of the last century, technologies and methods of care taking have also been actively developed.
As a result of increased unit sizes, the traditional personal interaction between the human and the animal is no longer possible. Growth poses a threat to the animals' health as well. Infectious diseases and/or poor quality of feed, for instance, have become serious problems, even on the international level.
If problems due to overproduction are to be controlled, it is vital that real-time information about the production of agricultural goods, e.g. milk, is available. To be able to control global changes in the levels of production, certain predictability is a precondition. This can only be achieved when data about all factors contributing to the level of production can be gathered from as many a production unit as possible.
Stricter consumer demands are reflected in animal husbandry too. Only goods that do not have any flaws and whose origins are known are accepted by the food industry. The so-called health foods, for instance, impose strict criteria to the conditions of the primary production; only well-controlled products, whose origins of as a link in the value chain can be reliably investigated, are approved of.
Today, various mechanisms of subsidizing and pricing that support the structures of production are also a part of the domain of animal husbandry. While agricultural and basic domestic animal products are seen as vital for national self-sufficiency, these goods are at the same time sold for less than their real production costs on the world market. National subsidies and differing production costs enable the creation of frameworks of speculation and speculative profits.
To cope with the above-mentioned and other threats, animal identification systems have been developed that can be used, for instance, to investigate the origins or health conditions of animals. The US patent application US2001/0016681 describes a system with which it is possible to keep health records of individual animals and to, for example, obtain information about the medication used for treating each animal. Animal identification is based on a code (e.g. bar code) in the earmark, which can be read with a manual scanner. Patent U.S. Pat. No. 5,818,354, on the other hand, features a telemetric system for the individual surveillance of the physical condition of each animal in a larger group, as indicated by heart rate and body temperature. Each animal wears a collar with censors and a transmitter that sends the measured data to a portable receiver.
One of the downsides of these known solutions is their locality, that is to say, the fact that they offer surveillance and other information only locally, within a certain environment (e.g. one producer) and with regard to a certain purpose. Practicing animal husbandry always necessitates the interaction of different reference groups with differing interests as far as the size of the group to be controlled and the desired measures are concerned. In addition to tenders and farmers, authorities and specialists of different fields, for example, often partake in the processes and if they wish to single out the animals of a certain producer, or a specific animal, for control or other measures, it is nowadays necessary that they go physically to the farm in question.
The invention described here aims to create a new kind of a surveillance system which is not hampered by the before-mentioned flaws and which could significantly enhance the practicing of animal husbandry in relation to the requirements above.