Solar Livestock Ear Tags & Farm LoRaWAN: No-SIM Tracking for Sheep & Cattle

The running cost of tracking a flock is not the tag, it is the airtime. Put a 4G collar on every animal and you are paying a SIM and a data plan per head, every month, forever. Solar livestock ear tags on a farm LoRaWAN network flip that: the tags report to a gateway you own, so after the hardware there is no per-animal cost at all, and a solar top means multi-year life instead of a winter battery swap. Last updated: August 2026. How farm LoRaWAN works LoRaWAN is a long-range, low-power radio network you run yourself. You mount one LoRaWAN gateway somewhere high on the farm, connected to broadband or a 4G router, and it picks up every tag in range, typically several kilometres across open ground and more from a good vantage point. The tags themselves are tiny radios: they sip power, send a position on a schedule, and never touch the mobile network. No SIM per animal, no data bill, no coverage gaps where a phone would have no bars. That is the key difference from cellular tracking. A 4G tag is simple to start with, one SIM and it works anywhere with signal, but it costs per head every month and drains battery talking to distant masts. A LoRaWAN tag costs a gateway once, then runs almost free. On any farm with more than a handful of animals, LoRaWAN wins on total cost. Why solar ear tags suit British farms Self-charging for the long haul. A solar-topped ear tag tops up whenever there is daylight, so it keeps reporting through a season rather than needing pulled off and recharged. The honest test is a British December, weak sun and short days, so a properly specced tag is sized for winter, not just summer. Ear-tag form factor. They sit where a management tag already goes: light, low-profile and unlikely to snag. That makes them ideal for sheep and for tracking a representative sample across a flock rather than collaring every animal. Built for the field. Weatherproof, impact resistant and UV stable for year-round outdoor use. You rarely tag every animal. A sensible sample per field gives movement and geofence alerts for the whole group, with breeding or high-value stock tagged individually. See the livestock tracking range for the current tags and gateways. No signal at all? Satellite steps in Some ground has neither a farm gateway in range nor mobile coverage. For that we stock a satellite (NTN) version of the solar tag that reports from genuinely remote hill and moor, so even the far parcels are not a black hole. From tag to live paddock map: Flockarewe Hardware only earns its keep with a dashboard you will actually open. The tags and gateways we supply feed straight into Flockarewe, our sister livestock-tracking platform. It puts every tagged animal on a live paddock map, fires geofence alerts the moment stock strays, and shows movement trails so a stray becomes a location rather than a search. Its AI, "Shep", learns normal grazing behaviour and flags the exceptions that matter: a cast animal, a ewe gone to ground to lamb, an illness, or a whole mob scattering from a predator or an open gate. Because Flockarewe is our sister brand, livestock tracking and farm CCTV run as one estate: the same LoRaWAN gateway that reads your ear tags can sit alongside solar farm cameras for a single view of stock and yard. Get it specced for your ground Tell us the stock, the ground (enclosed fields, open hill or common) and how often you need a fix, and we will spec the tags, the gateway coverage and any satellite units for the far parcels, at trade pricing for farms and estates. Talk to our UK team. Free UK delivery over £75.