One way you probably didn’t know drones were being used

Everyone loves a tool that just makes your job easier. Technology can takeover plenty of little things in life like taking notes, scheduling meetings, and well, you get the point. But what about counting extremely expensive herds of cattle? Don’t worry, DJI’s Mavic 3 Enterprise is here.

A quick crash course on how you get beef, first you have to purchase it from a store, who purchases it from likely a distributor, who purchased it likely from a cattle farmer, who breeds and raises herds of thousands of cattle somewhere out in the country. Each cow can cost thousands of dollars when you sell it, so keeping track of how many you have is an important, regular, and painfully manual process to do.

HeadCount Inventory is using drones to make this task easier, accurate, and faster. The company uses Mavic 3 Enterprise drones, a relatively cheap piece of equipment in the world of specialized industry machinery, and all it needs to do is fly over a cattle yard, take photos, and it says will count each “head” of cattle to 99.997% accuracy.

The company offers two services, a full count, which launches a swarm of drones up to count up to 90,000 heads in about two hours, and automated services that fly over feed yards to give regular statistics to cattlemen on their herd.

“We’ve taken something that wasn’t verifiable outside of the human element,” Tyson Johnston, director of operations at HeadCount, told Drovers. “We aren’t trying to replace humans … we have a platform that integrates the human and technology variable.”

HeadCount is looking to be an accessory to humans doing their same job, because when something is as pricy as a ready to eat full cow, you don’t want to leave any chance of a software bug ruining your livelihood.

The company doesn’t hide the fact that what they’re doing out in the field isn’t super unique, they share in a promotional video that anyone can take a photo, the key is the quality control that happens after the fact. So in reality, there could even be a world where a ranch sends up their own DJI Mini drone, takes some photos, uploads them to HeadCount’s software, and then receives a count.

And counting cattle isn’t the only thing HeadCount can do, it also provides services to track commodity tracking, ensuring ranchers have up to date numbers on their inventory.

Tech like this is what gets myself super excited about drones and the overarching technology. While it’s great to capture stunning photos or jaw dropping video, its crazy to think that a roughly $4,000 drone, a few hours of holding cattle in place, can change how a massive industry does one part of its business.