# [Case Study] Precision Livestock Monitoring with Autonomous Drones

- Event: NestGen ’25
- Published: March 7, 2025
- Length: 20:26
- Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/zg4hXihffqU/

> The transcript of a recorded NestGen session, for reading or for use with an AI tool. It comes from the video's
> captions; automatic captions can mishear names and terms.

## Transcript

**[0:20]** hello and welcome to another insightful session at nesen 2 I'm Nur your host for this session and today we're exploring a real world case study on how autonomous drones are transforming livestock monitoring the Agriculture and livestock Industries have long relied on manual inspections GPS Scholars and human labor to track and manage cattle Health movements and security but with doed autonomous drones we are witnessing a game-changing shift towards Precision livestock monitoring enabling farmers and ranchers to optimize operations improve efficiency and enhance Animal Welfare to ensure a smooth and engaging session here are a few quick reminders drop your questions in the Q&A box anytime we'll address them after Conrad's presentation engage with us share your insights thoughts and key takeaways in the chat join the

**[1:22]** conversation on LinkedIn and Twitter using nesen 2025 let's keep the discussions going before we start this insightful session and hand things over I'd like to take a moment to thank all our incredible sponsors who helped make nesen 25 a success finally I would love to introduce you to coin brand the project manager at agtech 360 an expert in agricultural technology and precision monitoring who will share insights and how drone autonomy is solving real world challenges in livestock management and with that let's get into today's session Conrad the stage is yours thank you all right let's get the screen well firstly hello everyone and thanks for joining thanks for the introduction I'm Conrad from actic 360 project manager also engineer um the topic

**[2:28]** for today I changed a little bit to make it a bit more broader and yeah it's quite a mouthful so I told you engineer so I'll break it down into first principles oh sorry I'm just double checking if everything is good sorry I'm just trying to check and see if this is actually broadcasting I had some comments that it still says waiting for host okay thank you then I I'll continue sounds like everything is going ahead um

**[3:32]** okay so like I've said sorry for that the title Precision agriculture with autonomous drones that's quite a mouthful touch on a lot of topics so I'll try and break it down so autonomous drones and pres Precision agriculture I'll give you a bit of a background for myself maybe that can help a bit with the presentation so I grew up in rural South Africa been on farms all my life later life moved to New Zealand were involved in technology and Agriculture and then the same in Australia been the last 10 years working in technology and agriculture so maybe I'll start with a bit of of Australia and I'll start with the unofficial tourist map of Australia to give you a bit of understanding so as you can see on this map the green areas is where things on land can kill you the blue areas the things on water can kill you and the black areas we both can kill you so that's obviously not serious but yeah there a bit of a

**[4:36]** joke to give you a background of the unique set of challenges in Australia so Australia is known for its varable climate drought flights extreme temperatures and is one of the dest habited continents it's also a massive areas I mean just to give you a bit of background driving from coast to coast it's like driving to the moon and back twice and the same as everywhere else in the world labor short this finding skilled um workers especially in remote areas becoming harder and harder resources are scarce water and also very diverse landscape so that all leads to the need for Innovation and how do we meet this challenge with Precision agriculture so I'll touch on prision agriculture first I mean and go bit of the detail so Precision agriculture what is precision agriculture I mean it's data driven I mean it's appro to farm management all these inputs it's a use of Technologies and

**[5:38]** the ability to make realtime informed decisions so once again I warned you I'm engineer I'll just break this down once more handling data on agriculture I mean normally by this time farmers get really bored falls asleep but it basically means integrating all the data sources bringing all this data into one place to enable them to make the decisions informed decisions and forecast and also optimizing the operations technology a bit more exciting these days there's a number of offerings from drones that can do various tasks surveying spraying senses measuring water solar conditions weather um satellite imagery real time satellite imagery that can measure conditions give you information on your pastures software to record store and then connect ity especially in Australia satellite internet made a huge leap forward and enabled Farmers to move towards Precision Agriculture and then last but not least real time information and real time

**[6:42]** information make it farmers and able to do fast based real decisions is no longer a luxury it's a necessity to keep up with markets keep up with prices when to buy when to sell obviously optimizing resources and in the long run ensur sustainability now a bit more for the more exciting stuff how does autonomous drones fit in Precision agriculture so drones and this new and exciting technology obviously the technology moved so far in the last 10 years I can still remember 10 years ago where it was high fives all around if you could fly five minutes with a GoPro and another round of high five if you managed to land into one piece so yep these days in longer flight times enhanced capabilities improved obstacle avoidance AI on board and the applications are also endless from AAL photography inspections measuring Parts there

**[7:42]** and also the technology becomes smarter it's easier to use software is easier and also seamless data integration so then autonomous drones how can they help and we've seen just in the short time we've been really playing agriculture I should say working in agriculture how autonomous drones help with labor shortages I mean just by performing repeat autonomous tasks someone can be freed up to focus on something else um Precision agriculture by really focusing on those areas of need and by surveying the drones can see where what needs to be done and also the ability to cover larger areas because these can work all day long they can work in all the conditions they don't get tired they just land recharge and can go again so how we bring it all together so we looked at a few case studies and a few applications so what we've done we've combined ACU 360 which is a software platform that I'm involved with this is basically a farm management platform bringing your

**[8:45]** live camera feeds um GIS data all your animal sensor data position data of animals medicine water measurement and weather into one single platform and then we also worked with flight p a company might have heard of a bit today for their drone autonomy software and interfacing to them to enable the control and the management of this drone so the first item we looked at is water monitoring so in the ACU platform which I said it's a GIS platforms all the waters tanks and infrastructure is drawn all the sensor data is brought to the front of the user you can see if any issues click on a water sensor see the levels and the condition and every now and then is obviously technology failure so the first is just how to look at Water inspections so I'm just going to start this video in this video we see a user just clicking on a water sensor seeing the water levels and it's all good but then also there's a sensor in this case that's not working not

**[9:47]** reporting so the user is able to click on it and to deploy the Drone so I'm just going to let this run for a bit it's a bit sped up it'll just give you an idea of how operation can be performed so in this scenario as the Drone is deployed live video feed is visible with all the safety features to return to home so this drone is now taken off it's flying to the asset or the water trough in this case it will go to the GPS coordinates stop then down take images and these images will be even while flying downloaded back to the unit and then a user can actually go to the asset click on it and view the images we even go further with some AI analyzing looking at these images detecting any issues and also

**[10:52]** estimating water levels kind just is a quick scenario on um on demand inspections for water this can also be scheduled in another example this just a dam the same Dam that's monitored on a schedule and you can see these two images totally different conditions and these were actually 12 days apart so once again free of the time to go inspect the water so I'll look we'll go back to livestock monitoring the platform also allows for GPS colors and GPS attacks to track animals in the spattered position in real time or should I say almost real time in this scenario we explored some cases of a broken fence if a fence is broken the user will get alert then is also able to deploy a drone to that location that can help them to in real time assess whether it's a actual broken fence just a how din C jumping the fence or if there's a TFT in

**[11:57]** progress once again Saving Time by just assessing the situation giving them real time information and then decide how to react other scenario these tags can also um give you information on any cow with uh what's the right word abnormal movements suddenly running around it might be a dog bear wolf something chasing it once the user received the alert it can also deploy a Dr just to do a visual inspection and yep in this scenario we can see yep this years look pretty calm to me and last but not the least a security it's a big Challenge on a lot of Industries in this specific platform AC is link to all the fixed cameras on properties so the live feed is 247 being analyzed any detection of objects or people using Ai and other techniques is reported and a drone can be deployed for a bit of a overview of the

**[12:58]** situation and in this case it's just Gathering more information being able to zoom in get evidence get number plates and as you all know and probably seen today these trains can be fitted with speakers as well with two-way communication so as a user you can go close and politely ask him to leave as well so that's the three scenarios we quickly looked at and that's happening now that's been done and as a dreamer myself I always look what's next and what's the future so future potentials and challenges as well I mean the first thing that we probably heard a lot of and will hear a lot of is artificial intelligence but I can see a scenario where a farmer within boundaries can have a number of these drones performing tasks fully autonomous deciding when they want to go where they want to go and do task like monitoring the crops see identify any issues early report back

**[14:02]** and give the user information the same with animal livestock it can fly County animals look where they're going and determine if there's any issues with their conditions early detection of diseases maybe see if the waters find report on the pasture just give the user the information he needs when he needs obviously a big Challenge and it's probably been touched on a few times today was the regulations Beyond visual of site I believe in safety is number one and it's always the technology will always involve and I believe the risk for Farmers also needs to be reduced without any adding or adding any risk to the airspace users so yep I believe this process will be streamlined looking forward to it and then lastly improved human interface none of these Technologies mean anything if there's an easy insightful way for users to view this data and also to manage it so yeah that's it

**[15:02]** in the nutshell what we've done as actic 360 we always looking forward to collaboration so it's very excited to he from anyone with any senses or data want to bring it into this platform also massive thank you and well just been a super Journey with flight pace and their API enabling us to interface to their drone and drone autonomy and yeah we're looking forward to feedbacks suggestions from Farmers and also other industry and this is our contact information if there's any questions but I assume you'll be finding out how to reach us thank you thank you Conrad so yes that was very interesting on how you covered an entire uh holistic Solution on how farmers and companies in agriculture Enterprises and agriculture can sort of enhance their operations and uh especially a use case like Precision livestock monitoring uh so we do have a couple of questions uh I think

**[16:08]** I'll just drop in and you can answer them so the first question is how is the latest advancement in AI going to change the Dynamics of drone um what are the applications of current AI systems and I thank you that's a really good question and I kind of touched with it in my last slide I mean once again to be fully autonomous we need to take humans out of it not fully out of it but allowing the Drone like I said to go and decide when he want to do it what he want to do and then just report back also bring in all the other sensors making Intelligent Decisions on what's the best way to react and also how to be predictive and how to predict issues and to treat I um issues while it's still minor and not letting become major issues right okay so moving on to the next question what's next for your drone based

**[17:08]** livestock monitoring are there additional features integration or use cases on your road map that others might be missing out on yes so firstly on the livestock monitoring with I'm not as lots of studies going on about visual uh inspection of animals and like I men before as well detecting of animals in stress the same with potential identifying When Animals wants to carve or having any issues with carving for instance and let the user know there's potential issues the same with diseases if there's any patterns can be recognized in the way they move the amount of time they spend in one location as well as optimizing water placements if the Drone can monitor the patterns of how the animals are moving potentially identifying if a water point was just moved to that side of of the pic they'll spend 50% less time walking and it's more efficient and easier for them to navigate right thank you thank you Conrad uh I think Greg uh wants to ask that

**[18:14]** uh this was supposed to be a case study so I think he wants to know more details about uh how agtech 360 is helping farmers and uh especially in the livestock monitoring uh area so if you can touch upon that a little bit I think our audence would kind of it it will help them understand better okay now that's all good so apart from the drones side of things and livestock monitoring there's weight monitoring so animals can get in weight quite often so that will establish patterns the same with the animal tracking and GPS movements are recorded So in planning a farm or a paddock it's quite good to see where the animals spend their time how they walk which areas they focus on also all this information can be brought back together what's the weight gain how long if the animal moved um and what's the results thereof the same with some of these GPS ear trackers they now provide information up to the detail of how many minutes this this animal walked around per

**[19:18]** day how minutes was it resting how many minutes grazing and the same for drinking water so once again adding the drone on top of that bring that imagery together will provide so much more information but yet this state major case studies was mainly focused on movement patterns uh pic utilization and animal [Music] growth right okay sure Conrad thank you so much I think these were the questions uh that we had uh thank you so much for joining in and thank you to everyone who um as well came to the session and intera Ed with us uh we look forward to seeing you guys very soon uh thank you and you can go ahead check out the agenda for the rest of the day and if there there are any sessions that interest you you can always hop in thank you so much have a good day thank you thank you very much