"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,'" he said.
Using a drone to track cattle along pastures boils down to two things: saving time and saving money.
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“Many will actually hire a helicopter, but those are very expensive. They’re $1,000 to $1,500 (per hour) and the ranchers can only afford to hire them to come once for about four hours,” he said.
“It takes a two- to three-hour job and turns it into a two-minute job,” Clay Harsany, a second-year Thompson Rivers University student, told CBC.
Harsany said he and others discussed flying a drone over each individual pen, taking photos and relaying the information back to a computer to count the cattle more efficiently.
Recently, he was asked to find nine missing cattle, and using a drone allowed him to do it quickly.
“Within an hour, I’d found five or six of them,” he told CBC.