Technology is being deployed throughout the agricultural sector at an exponentially-increasing pace. Applications of precision agricultural techniques and devices abound when it comes to crop production. Billy Cook, senior vice president and director of the Division of Agriculture at the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation thinks it’s about time to kick the use of technology into high gear with regards to animal agriculture. As a researcher, his specific interests involve replacement beef heifer selection and management and enhancing stocker cattle performance on cool-season and warm-season pastures.
He spoke at a recent seminar focusing on the burgeoning use of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. Cattle producers, he said, can look forward to being a part of this technological revolution.
“We’re going to have to utilize technologies as we go forward. Our producers need every opportunity and every advantage that is out there. I think that we tend to overlook technology to a point and then when we do introduce it, we don’t introduce it in a way that a producer realizes the value. So, we’re very interested in technology. In fact, we’re anticipating starting a new program looking strictly at the application of technology for producer solutions.”
In speaking with Radio Oklahoma Network’s Ron Hays after his presentation, Cook advocated what he calls the “smart ranch” concept. (Click on the LISTEN BAR at the bottom of this story to hear the full interview.)
“We have to emphasize it’s a concept at this point, but the idea being to gather as many technologies as we can, deploy them on a farm and then take the information or data that comes out of that to convert it to information and decision support that will help you make decisions on the farm-things that can replace labor, things that can replace other costly inputs or measurements--or the time that it takes to make measurements--to make decisions, to use sensor-based technologies to do some of that for us.”
He said the Noble Foundation has already laid a lot of groundwork in the area of beef cattle technology to help producers better measure the performance of their animals.
“We’ve got a collaboration with Grow Safe, Incorporated, a Canadian company, and their expertise is in individual animal intact measurement in a concentrated feeding situation and then frequent body-weight estimations of cattle. We’ve been working with Grow Safe now probably five years. And, typically, Grow Safe worked in a feed yard environment and in a confined feeding situation, like bull tests and things like that.
“What we’re trying to do is take that technology and apply it to a forage-based production system because that’s what’s meaningful in this part of the world for producers that are forage-based. So, we’re able to get a very good estimation of daily body weight particularly of stocker steers on pasture. In the past, you knew what they weighed when you put them on and what they weighed when you took them off. And, typically, you took them off based on the forage response, not necessarily the animal’s response. Some of the work that we’re doing now let us realize that with one year’s data-and it’s not analyzed yet-we can look at leaving those cattle on small grains pasture much longer than we thought without detrimentally hurting body weight gain.”
Cook also says that the new unmanned aerial vehicle technology will have broad implications for cattle producers. Right now, he says, just having up-to-date aerial views of how management decisions impact a rancher’s land could be very useful. As the technology evolves in the near future, it could be instrumental in animal inventory and location studies as well as being useful for understanding where prescribed burns would be beneficial.