 Hi, I'm John Noisky, an Extension Ag Machine Systems Specialist at NDSU Ag and Biosystems Engineering Department, and today what I'd like to talk about is a project we're doing here at the Grasslands Monitoring Cattle with solar-charged GPS tags and collars. And also the second thing I want to talk about is using drone UAV imagery to inventory cattle on pastures. But the first technology that I'd like to share is a, uses a network of system called Lora1 and what this is is an unlicensed frequency by the FAA in the United States that allows us to send data from the tags to an antenna we call a gateway to the internet so that you can put these tags on cattle and monitor their locations and monitor their movements. So if you collect that information over a period of days you can see the grazing pattern that's one of the objectives of this project is to see the grazing pattern of the cattle. These technologies allow you to access the location of the animals on the internet. The cattle have to be within about five miles of the antenna and it has to be kind of a line of sight, trees don't seem to bother and small hills don't bother. So this is an opportunity from a rancher's point of view to be able to monitor location of cattle, tell whether or not they're in the fence or outside the fence. In the case of this project again we're focusing on grazing patterns. The second thing that I want to talk about is being able to inventory cattle using drone imagery. And we've been experimenting with that throughout the season and find that it is successful. We've been accurate in counting the animals and pastures. One issue that we have is in the United States you can only fly a drone at 400 feet above the ground. That means that you're going to have to collect a series of pictures and prepare what we call a mosaic to attach them together to make one image. And the issue with that of course is the animals on rangeland are moving. So the drone flies down and takes pictures of the cattle and then flies back 200 feet away and the same animal might be in both pictures. So that's an issue but we find that the software is able to determine which is a stronger image and that's the one that counts. So we're finding it to be accurate. The best way to do this is to fly as high as you can. So in our case that's to fly at 400 feet. So in summary, first of all the Laura 1 technology and the GPS tags, they're a system that are available to the public. We're using them as a research project but they're available. Unfortunately the tags are a bit too expensive. They're like $75 each. So you would put them on just a few animals, maybe expensive animals that you want to make sure that you monitor the location and seeing that they're moving. But it is a technology that is coming down in price and there are several companies around the world that are doing this. I can share that if you're interested, contact me. And as far as the drone technology, that's something that the only issue is that it does require mosaic-ing the imagery. So after you land it takes an hour or two to put that imagery together.