I followed it with interest - they had leap-frogged the state mandated scheme in AU and NZ by pushing UHF RFIDs instead of the LF ones we're stuck with down under - but it's hard to tell if most US cattle farmers have even heard of it.
I followed it with interest - they had leap-frogged the state mandated scheme in AU and NZ by pushing UHF RFIDs instead of the LF ones we're stuck with down under - but it's hard to tell if most US cattle farmers have even heard of it.
I was part of a pilot program using drones and RFIDs in Brazil some 10 or 15 years ago. It was cool, but the ranchers still ended up having to go out and put eyes on cows when some went missing or died so it didn't really solve a problem, just narrowed down the area a bit.
I have a small drone here that I use so I can sit on the deck and still check water tanks and cows, or look for babies so I don't have to go out in the mud. But I don't know anyone else in 20 miles of me that does that.
This is a shame really because it really sounds like a pretty good use case that would be easy to adopt if you could just go down to some farm supply company and pickup a drone and be flying it over your farm the same day. Instead you end up having to figure out licensing requirements and worrying about the restrictions when you don't really want to deal with interpreting and understanding FAA regulations and you shouldn't really have to if you're using the tech over your own land in a rural setting.
Would be cool if one day you could buy a Matterport or Leica Disto equipped LIDAR photo scanner (like Fixar or Wingtra) to survey the entire property based on GIS tax parcel data and then in the software you could select things to photograph on a regular schedule and all you'd have to do is look through the photos each day. Eventually machine learning could be used on the photos and you'd be able to have something like pagerduty for agtech as someone mentioned elsewhere to tell you where to focus your time.
Not sure how well this would work with some livestock since I can't imagine they would like drones buzzing about.
That said, I've got no ag experience so not really sure how much labor this really saves. Just cool to think about.