Predator Guardian — Livestock Protection AI

Coyotes, wolves, and big cats don't keep business hours — and a single bad night can wipe out a season of lambs. Predator Guardian gives a farm a tireless sentry: cameras that tell a coyote from a calf, and the reflexes to scare it off before it ever reaches the fence line.

Edge VisionTensorFlow LiteCoral TPUMQTTGPIO ControlSolar/LoRaNode.jsReact

Industry

Agriculture / Livestock

Scale

Medium–Large · Edge + cloud

Status

Operational on working farms

// Problem

The challenge

Predation is one of the largest uninsured losses in small-scale ranching. Traditional defenses — guardian animals, fixed lights, fencing — are passive and easily learned around. The rancher wanted something that could see a threat coming across dark, remote pasture and respond on its own, on land with no power and barely any cellular signal.

// Solution

What we built

A network of solar-powered, AI-equipped watch posts that detect predators and trigger an escalating deterrent response automatically — no human required at 3 a.m.

Low-light / IR cameras running a TensorFlow Lite classifier on a Coral edge TPU, trained to distinguish predators (coyote, wolf, cougar, fox, bear) from livestock, people, vehicles, and benign wildlife
Graduated response engine: at the first confident detection it triggers motion-activated strobes and ultrasonic units; if the threat presses closer it escalates to audible deterrents and an SMS/push alert to the rancher
Zone awareness — deterrents fire only toward the threat's bearing, so the herd isn't spooked from every direction
Off-grid by design: solar + battery nodes meshed over LoRa back to a farmhouse gateway
A simple dashboard with every event: clip, species, confidence, time, and which deterrent fired

// Architecture

How it works

Each post is self-contained — it makes its own detection and can act even if the network is down, then publishes events over MQTT (bridged across LoRa) to a Node.js gateway. The gateway logs to a local database, syncs to the cloud when a connection is available, and powers the React dashboard. Deterrent hardware is driven over GPIO/relay control with strict safety interlocks and quiet-hours rules so the system is a good neighbor.

// Outcome

Results

Confirmed predator approaches turned away automatically, overnight, with no human intervention
Deterrent "habituation" reduced by randomizing and escalating the response instead of repeating one trick
A complete, searchable record of nighttime activity the rancher had never had visibility into before
Architecture generalizes to crop-raiding deer, barn intrusion, and gate-left-open detection

// Have a similar problem?

Let's talk about what you need built.

Custom-engineered solutions — no generic platforms, no compromises.

Start a Project →