From Cows to Canvas: Monitoring Farm Emissions in Grafana

Sunil Gopalakrishna, a researcher at Germany's Thünen Institute of Agriculture Technology, uses Grafana to monitor real-time emissions from naturally ventilated livestock barns — one of the harder environments to measure because animals move freely between indoor and outdoor areas.

In this GrafanaCON talk, Sunil explains how his team built the Sensor Array Measuring Ball: a low-cost sensor cluster measuring ammonia, CO2, particulate matter, and differential pressure, deployed at barn interfaces and connected via LTE in locations with no reliable Wi-Fi. Sensor data flows into InfluxDB and then into a Grafana dashboard built around the Canvas panel, which maps the physical barn layout with live sensor readings positioned inside it. The dashboard also includes live video feeds from partner barns, annotations marking measurement periods (growth phase, fattening phase, herd changes), and a data completeness panel that flags sensor or server issues as they happen. After finding that raw InfluxDB outputs weren't usable by field technicians, Grafana became the layer that made the data accessible to the whole team.

0:00 Introduction
0:24 The Challenge: Measuring Emissions in Open Barns
1:23 The Sensor Array Measuring Ball
2:11 Data Transmission via LTE
3:14 InfluxDB and the Move to Grafana
3:55 Canvas Panel: Mapping the Barn Live
4:42 Annotations, Video Feeds, and Data Completeness
5:17 Architecture Summary

Links/resources:
Have a question? Ask Grot, your AI helper: https://grafana.com/grot/
Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf

---
Thanks for watching!

👍 Was this video helpful? Like and subscribe to our channel for more videos.

Connect with Grafana Labs:
X: (https://www.twitter.com/grafana)
LinkedIn: (https://www.linkedin.com/company/grafana-labs/)
Facebook: (https://www.facebook.com/grafana)

#Grafana #Observability #Emissions #Agriculture #Cows #Farms