By Idele
For the last 4 years, Idele (French Livestock Institute) has been part of the ICAERUS project and elaborated a practical guide for the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) use, to finally be ready to take off! It is meant for people already using a drone in their activities in agriculture and questioning their use, but also for farmers wondering if they should get one. Let’s discover how this polyvalent and accessible tool can simplify your cattle management.
ICAERUS project took place from July 2022 to July 2026. For this 4 years duration Idele got the opportunity to explore the possibilities of drone applications in livestock farming. It helped us to discuss on 3 points regarding the potential of drone in livestock farming:
- The usefulness of drones in livestock farming
- The usability of drones in various contexts in livestock farming
- Examples of drone implementation to improve cattle management
The first question addressed during the 4 years duration of ICAERUS project: is the drone useful in livestock farming?
The answer is YES! The drone can be seen as an « eye in the sky » for the farmer, giving a complementary point of view on the cattle and bringing new elements to help manage the animals according to their close environment. Drones help farmers improve their time management by reducing the time needed to look for animals’ location in large grasslands, by limiting the number of unnecessary travels to grazing parcels where any action from the farmer isn’t needed, and by saving time by watching large areas from the sky and identify quickly zones of interest.
To expand the possibilities of the drone in livestock farming, you can consult the dedicated blogpost (https://icaerus.eu/practical-guide-for-drones-in-livestock-farming/) or download the guide (https://icaerus.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Practical%20guidelines%20for%20drones%20in%20livestock%20farming.pdf).
The second question this project helps to answer concerns the usability of the drone in livestock farming.
We collected the feedback from our main users: two farms representing two different climatic regions of France. The first one works on beef cattle in Burgundy (center-east of France) and the other farm works on sheep cattle in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (south-east of France). Each of them has its own specificities regarding location, climate, topography, parcel fragmentation, farm conduct and animal needs. They all use grazing pastures to feed the animals with a specific calendar planning each. This variability results in different uses of drones to better suit the dedicated livestock production in adequation with its location and the farm goals.
More details hereafter:
- Ferm’Inov, experimental farm in Burgundy dedicated to the Charolaise beef production. The use of drone for watching the animals in large grasslands has been a great success and new applications have emerged as the project went on. From a “simple” eye-in-the-sky, users managed to adapt it to find lost cows, assess parcel degradation caused by wildlife animals (boars, coypus) and save precious time by flying over remote large pastures.
- Experimental farm of Carmejane, in south-east area of France and dedicated to sheep pastoral production specifically. The farm is in the Alps mountains area and thus the importance of the pilot is crucial in this context: there are fewer safe zones for the flight due to the mountains, with an important variation of the topography, and so the pilot must be alert to the drone and its environment of flight. The drone is used to watch over the flocks of sheep, find where they are in the mountains and be sure they have enough water and food available in the pastures.
These two user cases emphasize the importance of considering various aspects of the drone and the context it will take off before thinking about getting one.
To go further we developed an AI-based algorithm to count sheep in video of the flocks, to help get a good monitor of the flocks.
The drone takes a video of the flock regrouping in a safe pastoral shelter (to protect the sheep for the night). It counts the number of sheep by analysing the video with artificial intelligence algorithm. The process takes about 10 minutes (from video record to the result of the sheep counting) and can alert quickly if sheep is missing.
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Find more details in the dedicated blogpost.
