Anti-Cattle Rustling Device for Local Community

Cattle rustling has become a threat and a major crime in Nigeria recently. To minimize this, there is a need to ensure cattle safety and provide substantial security when rearing cattle both in ranches and open fields. This necessitates the need to deploy technology to attenuate cattle rustling. This study developed and tested an animal tracking device using the Internet of Things (IoT). The developed system consists of three units that were interfaced together. These units are the GPS Tracker (made up of the microcontroller, ATtiny chips©, ATMega328©, etc.), the Mobile Application, and the Database unit. The developed animal tracker was tested and the results showed that the constructed tracker is equivalent to the standard GPS and adds more information about cattle location, breed, color, weight, etc. The developed GPS tracker is a long-time security and monitoring aid that will be used to eradicate cattle rustling in Nigeria and identify cattle and other information which enables easy identification of cattle when lost. The addition of extra features such as location history was also implemented to improve the overall user experience.

I. Introduction

In Nigeria, the agricultural sector of the economy is very large, surpassed only by Oil and Gas. Agriculture accounts for 40% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and 54% of the population depends on agriculture for sustenance. 70% of the rural populace are smallholder farmers who depend on agriculture to make a living. As impoverished as they appear, they still contribute over 50% of the calorific requirements of the population, but food insecurity is becoming more acute. As of the year 2020, about 800 million people worldwide go to bed on an empty stomach every night, out of which about 690 million including 144 million children are located in the developing world [1]. So, to feed a population that is expected to grow to 9 billion people by 2050, the world will have to double its current food production. Hence, there is a need to increase food production and reduce food theft and waste. Agricultural production encompasses a wide range of activities including cattle rearing which falls under livestock farming. Theft of grazing cattle which is known as cattle rustling is a pending problem that needs to be urgently solved to increase global food production which falls within the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, Zero Hunger.