A service oriented livestock management system using occasionally connected mobile-cloud architecture

Animal identification and traceability have become increasingly important in the agriculture and food industry in recent decades mainly as a way to control quality and to manage animal health information and infectious diseases. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology has become the industry standard for managing livestock such as in dairy farms. Traditional herd management software has many deficiency and limitation. We propose a Web-based service oriented herd manage application by leveraging the emerging Web 2.0 technologies and an occasionally connected mobile database synchronization framework. This new architecture can provide improved accessibility, more up-to-date information and lower cost of ownership for the herd management software system. An initial prototype has been developed and tested on a three thousand cow dairy farm with encouraging result.