Barn Owl
The Case for Off-Grid Farm Surveillance

When I ask most farmers and ranchers whether they have security cameras on their property, the vast majority say no. Why? Same answer almost every time: "We don't have Wi-Fi out there."

It’s understandable to assume that no Wi-Fi means no cameras. For most of our lives, cameras meant wires, and wires meant infrastructure. If your barn is a hundred yards from the house, your water tank 50 miles away, or your gate at the edge of a long driveway — these have always seemed like blind spots by default. Places you simply couldn't watch. Places where if something happened, you dealt with it after the fact.

At Barn Owl, we've spent nearly a decade challenging that assumption. Because the truth is that you don’t need Wi-Fi to see every corner, tractor, building and animal on your property. Even if you’re on the other side of the world.

A Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

Farmers and ranchers manage some of the most asset-intensive, geographically dispersed operations in any industry. A single ranching operation might span thousands of acres, manage hundreds of head of livestock, and maintain infrastructure such as fencing, tanks, equipment, barns, gates across terrain that no single person can physically monitor.

And yet the vast majority of that infrastructure sits unwatched. Or manually checked at the cost of time, fuel, and hourly pay.

The consequences are real and costly. Trespassers access remote parcels undetected for months. Predators attack animals. Calving requires constant all-night watch in the cold. Water tanks run dry, freeze or overflow without anyone knowing. Equipment walks off jobsites and feed lots. Leased parcels are used, abused, or poached on, without the landowner ever being aware. Even remote personal properties such as cabins and rentals fall victim to the same blind spots.

These aren't edge cases. They are daily realities for agricultural businesses and rural property owners of every size, from family farms to commercial feed lots. And most operators have simply accepted them as the cost of doing business in remote environments.

They don't have to.

Visibility Without Infrastructure

The shift that makes modern farm surveillance possible where there’s no Wi-Fi is cellular technology combined with solar power. Barn Owl builds cameras that connect via 4G LTE across any local network, automatically selecting the strongest available signal.
They're powered by integrated solar panels that keep them running indefinitely, with no shore power, no extension cords, and no battery-swapping required.

Every Barn Owl kit ships complete and ready to deploy: camera, solar panel, A/C adapter (for indoors), mounting hardware, and SIM card included. Setup takes under five minutes. The camera begins sending HD photos and video to your phone or computer immediately, from anywhere with cell signal — which, for most agricultural operations in the U.S., covers far more ground than operators assume.

RangeCam 2 is our every day low-cost monitoring system for exactly this kind of coverage. It delivers real-time HD photos and 1080p video with no-glow infrared night vision, smart motion detection that distinguishes between people, vehicles, and animals. At $299, with plans starting at $7 per month and no contracts, it removes the financial barrier that has historically kept surveillance out of reach for smaller operations.

For situations that demand real-time eyes — a calving barn during peak season, a high-traffic gate, a feed lot at night — the RangeCam Live adds continuous livestreaming with audio directly to your device. Watch a heifer labor in real time from your bed. Confirm that the crew showed up at the remote site before you make the drive. Check whether the tank is full before moving cattle.

One Platform, Many Pain Points

The same camera monitoring a calving barn in February is repositioned to a pasture gate in the summer. The unit watching a water tank doubles as a trespassing deterrent on a leased parcel. A feed lot manager deploys four cameras across their operation and checks them all from a single app before their morning coffee.

We designed the Barn Owl HQ platform for agricultural operators and rural property owners, not IT departments. There are no complicated dashboards, no technical configuration, and no requirement for a smartphone beyond the basics. If you can receive a text message, you can use our system.

The customers who get the most from our cameras are often the ones who walked in most skeptical: operators who had spent years assuming surveillance simply wasn't an option for their situation. For them, the first week with a RangeCam isn't about any specific feature. It's about the experience of finally seeing what's been happening on their property all along.

Recognized as a Top Farm & Ranch Camera Company for 2026 by Agri Business Review, Barn Owl Tech designs off-grid cellular surveillance systems for farms, ranches, feed lots, and rural properties of all sizes. All systems include a 45-day risk-free trial and a two-year hardware warranty.

Visit barnowl.tech to learn more or start your trial.

Barn Owl Tech is a veteran-owned company headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Founded in 2016. Contact: shop@barnowl.tech | 720-594-5533