The problems of farms that breed sheep are basically the same points as in other areas of animal husbandry, but with their own peculiarities. Just like in the cattle farming business, sheep farms face a multitude of paperwork, challenges in tracking feeding and vaccination, and the need for monitoring the condition of each sheep and its location in a specific pen. But there are also special difficulties in identification, since standard ear tags do not fit under the sheep's ear due to the specificity of the structure. We were given a specific task to conduct research and testing of tags available in the world, which can be attached to the ear of a sheep, have a small size and light weight, as well as to develop a concept of a software and hardware complex for the automation of accounting and digitization of the enterprise with a gradual rejection of paper documents.

Our managers and engineers monitored the global market of identifiers. We held talks with manufacturers and specialists from Ireland, Turkey, China, New Zealand and Australia. According to the result of the received technical documentation, characteristics (among which the key criteria were weight and dimensions, radiation range and cost), we chose 3 main models and ordered 10 samples. We analyzed manual and stationary readers that were supposed to help identify sheep manually in the pens and automatically in the runs to the feeding area and the vaccination area. As manual readers, we chose devices based on the Android operating system, for which we were asked to develop a mobile application that would immediately identify a sheep and display its electronic passport, as well as send data to a central database via the Internet. Also we selected stationary readers that recorded the direction of movement of sheep along the run and provided information about its location on the farm.

As a result of conducting research in several stages, laboratory tests and equipment testing, we developed technical documentation and system architecture that completely covered all the primary requirements of the customer: electronic registration of sheep, creation of a digital passport of each sheep with records of feeding, vaccination, weighing and other biometric parameters, respectively to the requirements of the European Union. We selected all the necessary equipment, which we strengthened with hubs of our own development to combine them into one network for data exchange with the central server and handed over to the customer the complete concept of a mobile application that will be installed on handheld readers.