Cattle Trace is great for people with 10s of thousands of acres to manage. But that's not all that many cattle operations in the grand scheme of things. Most of us are small operations that don't interact with major processing plants and so on. We all know when someone has a sick cow and we all talk to each other.
I was part of a pilot program using drones and RFIDs in Brazil some 10 or 15 years ago. It was cool, but the ranchers still ended up having to go out and put eyes on cows when some went missing or died so it didn't really solve a problem, just narrowed down the area a bit.
I have a small drone here that I use so I can sit on the deck and still check water tanks and cows, or look for babies so I don't have to go out in the mud. But I don't know anyone else in 20 miles of me that does that.
I assume FAA Part 107, the basic license you need as a drone operator, wouldn't fully allow you to do what you're doing in the US at least. You're using the drone to go check on things you can't see from home. If you're lucky you'll be able to maintain visual contact with the drone, but you'd still need to go through the trouble to get a license.
This is a shame really because it really sounds like a pretty good use case that would be easy to adopt if you could just go down to some farm supply company and pickup a drone and be flying it over your farm the same day. Instead you end up having to figure out licensing requirements and worrying about the restrictions when you don't really want to deal with interpreting and understanding FAA regulations and you shouldn't really have to if you're using the tech over your own land in a rural setting.
Would be cool if one day you could buy a Matterport or Leica Disto equipped LIDAR photo scanner (like Fixar or Wingtra) to survey the entire property based on GIS tax parcel data and then in the software you could select things to photograph on a regular schedule and all you'd have to do is look through the photos each day. Eventually machine learning could be used on the photos and you'd be able to have something like pagerduty for agtech as someone mentioned elsewhere to tell you where to focus your time.
Not sure how well this would work with some livestock since I can't imagine they would like drones buzzing about.
That said, I've got no ag experience so not really sure how much labor this really saves. Just cool to think about.
I live on about 100 acres. I can see 80% of the land from my deck. The drone comes in handy for looking into the tree areas where the cows like to spend most of their without me having to go look for them. Besides, I figure if they won't do anything about the meth cook 3/4 mile away, they aren't going to care about me flying a small drone over my own land.
I was part of a pilot program using drones and RFIDs in Brazil some 10 or 15 years ago. It was cool, but the ranchers still ended up having to go out and put eyes on cows when some went missing or died so it didn't really solve a problem, just narrowed down the area a bit.
I have a small drone here that I use so I can sit on the deck and still check water tanks and cows, or look for babies so I don't have to go out in the mud. But I don't know anyone else in 20 miles of me that does that.