Farm Wide Cameras - A Brain Dump
Context
I grew up on a property that was fairly remote as properties in the UK go. Without a car, leaving the property was a chore and the local public transport connections were limited.
I could walk to the local village, then await an occasional bus to turn up and get a ride into a nearby town with a train station.
The farm was (and still is) sprawling, green and beautiful but had limited utility connections.
I still remember the dial up tone when connecting our old family Windows 95 PC to the internet via a phone line, and I was overjoyed when we finally got "Broadband". The speed was unbelievable and I couldn't imagine how we'd ever need anything faster.
Here we are 20-odd years later, and that hasn't changed much. The internet, and indeed landline phone is carried between trees across the farm. I like to think it also acts as a highway for insects and squirrels etc, but it's safe to say that the connection is flakey at best.
Other than that phone line, the farm is fed with an old water mains pipe which I presume has lived a life of degrading throughput over it's lifetime, and of course, an electrical connection.
The farm is not served by mains gas and currently doesn't have a fibre internet connection, although there is a lane that runs through the farm that I am told has the infrastructure in place already.
Anyway, you get the picture
Problem
As with many farms in the UK, there are a number of access points by way of driveways, field gates and footpaths.
Sadly, vans and other vehicles laden with waste and driven by opportunistic folk sometimes see these green fields as the perfect spot to dispose of their waste.
There have been a number of occasions where we've discovered a pile of garden waste, or household waste dumped on the property.
There are ways we can reduce the likelihood of this happening, and we've taken measures such as locked gates and blocked off some more informal entrances to the farm with mounds of soil. These measures however have had limited success and perhaps require further deterrence or even evidence gathering.
Insurance incentive
I believe that there is an incentive from insurance to place security cameras on the property.
The problem with this is that farms are large, and the important access points worth monitoring are typically not supplied by electricity, let alone a network connection.
🦅 Frigate
At home, I have repurposed an old PC to be a dedicated NAS with initially 8tb of storage available.
The device is running TrueNAS and I have Frigate running as an App on there.
That is connected to my single ReoLink Camera in the apartment and I quite like the features that it offers out of the box, and with the addition of some more intense hardware, could offer me some intelligent features.
That journey I went on, setting that up, made me revisit the idea of setting up cameras on the farm.
PoE vs alternatives
Following some light research I understand that there are a number of ways one can capture video footage from cameras remotely.
- PoE (Power over Ethernet)
- WiFi Cameras
- Cellular Cameras
- Remote Offline Cameras
PoE
Power over Ethernet allows data to be transmitted across a regular Ethernet cable, along with power to run the device.
This power is typically about 48v and is supplied by a PoE Injector or PoE Switch. Many devices however, run on just 12v.
This enables all sorts of solutions where bringing power as well as a separate data connection is cumbersome.
PoE is most often used for Wireless Access Points, and indeed, Security Cameras.
Many camera OEMs offer PoE variants of their cameras, and there are a number of third party PoE injectors and switches available to power them.
The downside to PoE is that it requires running Ethernet cable to the camera location.
alternatives
WiFi Cameras
In a farm context, having a WiFi Camera would rely on there being a WiFi Access Point within range of the camera itself.
This typically proves counterintuitive as if you are already bringing a wired data connection to a nearby access point, you may as well hard-wire the camera.
Cellular Cameras
These can be set up remotely, and can even be solar powered.
They do require a separate data connection via 4G or similar, and that comes with its own cost.
Remote Offline Cameras
These are similar to what you might call a Trail-Cam. A camera that is placed in a location, powered by batteries, and often supplemented with solar power, and record imagery to an onboard storage, like an SD Card.
These need to be maintained and don't offer any remote viewing capabilities (typically). They are also easier to steal...
100m Range of PoE
There is a standard defined for PoE, which declares that a PoE connection shouldn't really be longer than 100m. In the case of the farm, this isn't even remotely close enough. Some of the entrances to the farm are over 500m from the nearest source of electricity, let alone data.
Fibre Optic
Unlike copper Ethernet, fibre can carry data over much longer distances without losing signal—kilometres, not hundreds of metres. So in theory you could run a fibre link from the house or a barn out to a cabinet or small shed near a distant entrance, then run a short PoE drop to a camera from there. One fibre run could serve as the backbone to a cluster of cameras in that part of the farm.
I mentioned earlier that there's supposedly fibre infrastructure in the lane. If that ever gets connected to the property, it could become the natural backbone for a more serious setup. Until then, fibre is something I'm keeping in mind rather than planning on.
Point-to-point wireless
Another option is to avoid cable altogether for the long run and use point-to-point wireless links. The kind of thing Ubiquiti and others sell for connecting two buildings or a barn to the main house. You'd put a receiver unit near the entrance you care about (powered by a small solar setup or a long cable run if there's any power nearby), then a short PoE run from that unit to one or two cameras. You're still solving the power problem at the far end, but you're not having to trench or string Ethernet for 500m.
I haven't priced this properly; it's just a direction that seems plausible.
Prioritisation and hybrids
Realistically, I might end up with a mix. Perhaps one or two cameras on PoE where the run is short and there's already power. e.g. the main yard or the building closest to the house and something else for the far-flung spots. Cellular or trail-cam style for the rest, accepting that those are either ongoing cost or lower quality / no live view. Or wait until fibre (or a single strategic wireless link) makes a cluster of PoE cameras feasible and do it in one go.
What "good enough" looks like is really resolution, retention (storage) and perhaps some other nice quirks like number plate recognition. As is where the recording actually lives: Frigate at home is great for my flat, but for the farm you'd likely want something on-site or at least resilient if the link back home is as flakey as the rest of the setup.
Where this leaves things
I haven't ordered any hardware yet, let alone installed anything. This is really just a brain dump of where my head's at: the problem (deterrence and evidence), the constraints (distance, power, connectivity) are always worth keeping in mind. If fibre lands, or I finally pull the trigger on a small wireless link and a couple of cameras, I might revisit this and write up what actually worked. Until then, food for thought—for me, and for anyone else staring at a map of a farm and a 100m PoE limit.