Drones, AI making cattle counting a dream

The company says it is a worldbeating innovation with the potential to completely transform the way farmers around the world tackle livestock audits.

The trademarked SkyCount solution uses Microsoft Azure and Power Apps to reduce what’s typically a week-long manual labour for multiple people to a brief operation with just one drone operator, and without the need to physically move the animals or disrupt normal farming routines.

It works by videoing the farm by drone, at an altitude that does not disturb the animals, before analysis by an AI engine trained to differentiate between various animals and other objects. The company says it typically returns 97% accuracy on the first sweep, rising to 99.9% once a reviewer has gone over objects flagged as queries.

Stephen Guerin, PPG Wrightson chief executive, said the company was “very excited” by the new system.

PGG Wrightson does “quite a few” stock audits every year, often for farms being prepared for sale or for corporate farmers who need independent verification for their audits, but the company hopes the system will put independent stock counts in reach of smaller farmers as well.

Guerin said a normal manual stock count might commit a couple of PGG Wrightson team members, but then have to be postponed by weather or other unforeseen circumstances.

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“Then you overlay the operational impact for our farmer clients. They have to allocate staff, they have to move animals.

“Whereas this could do all that without those farming interruptions. What might take, on some farms, two days can be over and done with in three or four hours, without having to move animals or take staff away from other jobs,” said Guerin.

The software has been developed by Inde, a Christchurch-based independent IT consultancy which has been a technology partner with PGG Wrightson for about seven years, assisting with various digital needs. SkyCount is their first joint AI venture.

Inde co-founder and chief technology officer Rik Roberts says a count starts with the operator mapping the client farm and its paddock boundaries and programming the drone’s flight route. The count then takes “basically as long as it takes the drone to fly over the client farm.”

It then takes “about a minute” to process the video, then there is a validation step before producing the final report.

Roberts says the AI might encounter a rock that looks like an animal, or misses an animal due to it being partially obscured, but the operator can feed those instances back to the AI to continually improve the model.

Roberts says the AI might encounter a rock that looks like an animal, or misses an animal due to it being partially obscured, but the operator can feed those instances back to the AI to continually improve the model.

Guerin says the project started in December 2022 and took about 12 months to work through the model verification. They tried heat sensing cameras before settling on high-definition visible-light cameras.

“Heat struggles when you think about a paddock in Central Otago - a rock can be the size of a sheep pretty easily.”

Guerin says that Microsoft, whose AI “sits behind” the platform, says SkyCount is the most advanced application of its type they have seen.

Launched at the 2024 Mystery Creek Fieldays, the service is already available throughout the country.