In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have received considerable attention within agriculture and farming as a means to reduce operational costs and enhance animal health care. This paper examines the application of WSNs to livestock monitoring and the issues related to hardware realization. The core of this study is to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks by using alternative cheap, low power consumption sensor nodes capable of providing real-time communication at a reasonable hardware cost. In this paper, various factors i.e. radio frequency selection, channel bandwidth, etc. have been evaluated to provide a solution which can obtain real-time data from diary cattle whilst conforming to the limitations associated with WSNs implementations.