You know that you are being watched. Almost anywhere you walk these days, you can look up and see a security camera monitoring your every move. On the streets of New York City or even in your own cattle or hog barn, cameras are used for security and monitoring all the time.

Cattle, hogs, sheep, goats and poultry probably feel like they are being watched these days because farmers are using barn and premises cameras more and more to improve management and catch health issues before they become huge problems.

Early monitoring

That’s why it is so interesting to look back to the September 1994 issue of Nebraska Farmer, where we found a story on page 64, “The ‘eye’ in the barn,” written by now-retired editor Don McCabe, about Glen and his son Dan Schweppe’s dairy operation near Syracuse, Neb., using a camera and monitor developed through components of a home security system to help monitor dairy cows in the barns.

“During calving, the camera hangs from a ceiling mount, with the lens pointed to an area of the barn set aside for cows ready to calve,” according to the article. “A year ago, last spring, Dan on two different occasions, as he watched the monitor from inside the house, spied on a cow having difficulty calving. ‘We shot down to the barn and helped deliver the calves,’” Dan said in the article. “‘We likely would have lost the calves, maybe the cows, had we not noticed the trouble right away.’”

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The cameras on the Schweppes’ farm also pointed outside the barn to monitor dairy cows not yet bred, to help identify which cows came around in heat and could be bred by the bull. The family taped the video surveillance on their VCR so they could watch the tape and see if anything happened while they were gone in the fields.

Although this system may seem archaic today — because monitoring systems have become so sophisticated, including on farms and ranches — it was one of the earlier adaptations of camera surveillance technology for livestock.

Experience in the business

Riverwind Surveillance Supply is based in Alexandria, Ky., and has been marketing barn cameras and farm surveillance systems for 27 years. Personal experience — missing a filly in difficult labor and losing the foal back in 1994 — combined with experience in setting up video transmission working with an undercover narcotics unit pushed Dave Fickenscher into developing his own agriculture surveillance system company.

It started as a side gig for a full-time cop and has grown into a multimillion-dollar family-operated company that specializes in barn cameras. “Initially we worked with straight video transmitters, but the analog video transmission gave way to digital video around 2013, as the 2.4 GHZ receivers began to pick up interference from household equipment like routers and remote controls,” Fickenscher says. “The digital video eliminated the problem, but it gave a grainy image. At that time, this was the perfect fit, as most households had internet speeds too slow to stream online, but as speeds began to improve, we began offering data-based systems.”

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REMEMBERING: This article about an early adopter of barn camera surveillance on a Syracuse, Neb., dairy farm ran 30 years ago on page 64 in the September 1994 issue of Nebraska Farmer.

There was no more video transmission with data transmission. Images were clearer over long distances. “It also gave us the ability to integrate with phones and computers,” Fickenscher says. “Phone apps capable of handling the video stream along with improving internet speeds soon eliminated the analog video to TV systems.”

Right now, high-definition analog still is the most popular system because it allows HD video at a cheaper price than IP cameras, but networking cameras are a big part of Riverwind’s business too because they allow the customer to put the video on a TV, phone or computer, Fickenscher says. “We also use it in conjunction with the HD systems to provide coverage in secondary barns or around the house within the same system,” he says. “In recent years, we’ve begun to program systems that operate independently from internet straight to TV.”

What the future holds

“Cameras continue to evolve, and resolutions have increased to the point that many times it’s an unnecessary expense inside or around the barn,” he says. “The biggest advancements I see coming will be AI integrated in cameras. We already use this in non-farm settings,” as in law enforcement using cameras that can recognize people, faces and even guns, and send an alert.

“I’ve been contacted by AI companies that claim their integration can identify an animal walking into a barn,” Fickenscher adds. “We are staying on top of the advancements, and when AI tells us an animal is down and in labor, we’ll be all over it.”

Fickenscher notes that his company is based in agriculture. “Our cameras came to be because we live on a farm, and we are lucky enough to use them first,” he says. “We still live on a farm, and our shop is on a farm.” They have worked with universities and zoos, but their primary customers have always been farmers.

There is no doubt — just as with the Schweppes’ dairy back in Nebraska in 1994, or with the hundreds of customers who work with companies and new technologies like those marketed by Riverwind today — that surveillance systems save the lives of livestock on farms across the U.S. They allow farmers and ranchers to rest a little easier knowing they can monitor their animals remotely.

Learn more about Riverwind at barnwatcher.com.