Keeping track of a family can be difficult enough, but managing thousands of two-thousand-pound animals that roam freely across barns and pasture is a challenge on a different scale. That challenge led Belgium-based Pozyx, a pioneer in real-time location systems built on Qorvo’s Ultra-Wideband (UWB), to help modernize dairy farming with ultra-accurate animal tracking. What began as a simple request to locate cows has evolved into one of the largest non-consumer UWB deployments in the world, transforming how farmers monitor health, productivity and behavior across massive herds. 

“We committed the entire company to bringing this use case to life. We built a cardboard barn in our office and showed cows moving in real time.” — Samuel Van de Velde, Co-Founder, Pozyx 

The Challenge: Tracking Thousands of Animals Across Harsh, Dynamic Environments

Dairy farmers needed more than step counters. They needed exact location data to monitor movement patterns, reproduction cycles and changes in behavior across herds that ranged from a few hundred cows to more than ten thousand. Pozyx was asked to provide precise indoor tracking that could survive cold barns, mud, collisions and constant wear while also scaling to farms spread across multiple buildings. Early UWB systems were too expensive, too difficult to install and too limited to deploy at such scale. The challenge was to create a durable ear-tag tracker, a large-area UWB network and a system that could handle continuous data capture for thousands of animals every few seconds without overwhelming infrastructure or budgets. 

The Solution: A Scalable UWB Network and Rugged Ear-Tag System

Pozyx developed a robust UWB solution using anchors placed throughout barns, with each ear tag tracked by at least three reference points for high accuracy. Powered by our UWB technology, the system provides both real-time positioning and data communication, enabling precise behavior analysis and AI-driven health insights. Pozyx streamlined installation, automated production to support mass deployment and built ear tags tough enough to withstand the daily realities of dairy life. After a successful mock-barn demonstration, the system scaled globally, now installed in hundreds of farms that track cows every two seconds across multiple buildings. The result is a breakthrough in animal welfare and farm efficiency and one of the largest industrial UWB applications in the world 

For more detail about this solution, read the blog post.