Drone Assessment of Winter Feeding of Climate Resilient Cattle

In the Climate Resilience Cattle project, we are combining the Red Angus, Senepol, Galloway, and Scottish Higland Bos taurus breeds with the objective of producing a novel synthetic breed called the Climate Master Composite. Thermally equipped drones will be autonomously flown to each individual animal using the GPS coordinates supplied by Virtual Fencing collars placed around the animals neck. When in position above the cattle, the quadcopter will record video for a minimum of three minutes, providing stable footage for each animal for later behavioral assessment; and the drone will also capture radiometric JPEG photos to record the external surface temperatures with the goal of assessing the insulative value of each animal’s winter hair coat during morning, afternoon and evening collection periods. The overall objective is to produce a polled composite cattle breed that can withstand both hot and cold temperature extremes. We hypothesize that as the insulative value of an animal’s winter coat increases, the amount of radiated heat detected by the microbolometer on the radiometric camera will decrease and will help characterize the different winter coat phenotypes between our different cattle groups.

Faculty Supervisor:

John Church

Student:

Partner:

Universidade do Oeste de Santa Catarina

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Agriculture and Food; Sustainability & the Environment; Life Sciences (not health)

University:

Thompson Rivers University

Program: