I live in an area of New Jersey that is pocketed with small farms and grazing areas. Driving down our town’s Main St. I pass by several cow, sheep, and horse pastures. I’ll never forget the first time I had to rescue a lamb who had broken through a fence or the time I had to wait for a cow to finish strolling down the road as I waited to turn onto my street. A medium sized pasture abuts my children’s school, and several times we have received notifications that a shelter in place procedure was ordered because a cow or horse had wandered into the schoolyard. It’s comical, and luckily the pastures here are relatively small that fences and other issues are easy enough to handle. There are close to 700,000 ranches scattered throughout the United States. The average size of these ranches is around 450 acres, making them far more labor intensive to maintain than the small pastures where I live.

Keeping the country’s massive livestock ranches running is a constant undertaking. It’s a 365 days a year, sun up to sun down job. Fences need to be checked regularly to make sure animals aren’t escaping, mixing into other rancher’s lands, or allowing predators into a ranch’s boundaries. The grounds need to be monitored to make sure the animals always have plenty of food and water, to see that certain plants don’t overgrow posing fire hazards or dangerous conditions for animals. And then there are the animals themselves that need to have their health monitored. While 90% of the ranches in the US are family owned and operated, finding ranch hands has become increasingly difficult as few are willing to put in the tremendous work needed to work on a ranch.

This is why some ranchers are turning to drones to help keep their land and animals in top-notch shape. One of the fastest growing sectors for drone technology has been agricultural drones. These drones have made farming efficient and productive without taking jobs from farmhands or costing owners a fortune. But using drones with livestock has been a slower process due to the fact that animals can easily be spooked by a noisy flying object. Spooking a herd of cattle weighing between 1,000-2,000lbs each is not a good idea, no matter how strong your fences are. So gradually ranchers have begun introducing drones to cattle in a way that conditions them to respond to the drones with the same response they would have to traditional herding methods.

Joshua Jackson owns a cattle ranch in central Kentucky where he is also an agriculture professor at the University of Kentucky. He started experimenting with drones on his ranch for a number of reasons such as herding, land and fence monitoring, but most importantly, the health of the animals. Joshua said that within a week the cows acclimated to the presence of the drone so that he could use it without the worry of them becoming frightened and stampeding. Besides having a camera on the drone, Joshua also has sensors that can check the animals’ heart rate, allowing him to get a good picture of the herds’ well being.

Joshua is able to visually inspect the health and behavior of his cows within minutes by using the drone. The camera lets him see if any cows are injured, acting strangely, or even have minor illnesses like pink eye. An ailment like pinkeye is easy to treat, but left unattended can spread quickly through the herd. But, it is also an issue that is easy to miss when trying to manually monitor hundreds of animals. The heart rate monitor reinforces any visual information gathered by the drone’s camera, also proving that the cows have become unafraid of the drone. And that is just the start of how the drones are helping Joshua oversee the health of his cows. He explained that by “Using multiple drones, multiple pictures, and angles, stitch that together, create a 3D model, and use that to estimate the weight in the field, without ever running them across the scale.”

Monitoring the health of the animals on a ranch is obviously important, but doing so is extremely time consuming. It is just as time consuming to monitor hundreds of acres of land and miles of fencing. Overseeing of the land and fencing would typically be done every few months by a very expensive helicopter. With a drone, or even a fleet of drones, this could be done daily for a fraction of the cost. No more worrying if animals are escaping into schoolyards, or struggling to give a herd a basic checkup. Running a livestock ranch is a huge responsibility, but by taking advantage of drone technology it is a responsibility that can be better managed.

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