Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Cattle ranches experiment with drones to keep track of animals
Border collies could one day be phased out of a job on cattle ranches across Alberta and B.C. and replaced by a high-tech alternative — drones. "It was about two-and-a-half years ago I saw some kids playing
with a toy drone and I realized they had a camera on that drone and I
thought to myself, 'we could use this to observe cattle in pastures,'"
John Church, the cattle research chair at Thompson Rivers University in
Kamloops, B.C. told The Homestretch. "We can see the video feedback in real time, so for me, I
thought, 'wow, if we wanted to inspect cattle or look over that ridge or
look in that grove of trees, we can use these drones to extend our
vision." Ranches around Kamloops as well as parts of the Okanagan and aund Golden have been using drones for the past few years, a practise now making its way into Alberta. Second-year TRU student Clay Harsany has spent the summer flying the drones for a feeot operation near his hometown of High River.
"Counting cattle in feed yards is a very [tedious] job. On average it takes two to three hours… and you have to do it every morning," he said.
"So we came up with the idea, why can't we take a drone and place it 80 to 100 metres in the air and take pictures of each individual pen and then relay that information back to the computer and see if we can find a software company that will count the cattle automatically."
That's exactly what they did.
"It takes a two- to three-hour job and turns it into a two-minute job," said Harsany.
It also makes finding cattle easier....more
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1 comment:
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