Benefiting Local Farmers with Drone Technology for Forage Inventory

Posted: 10/21/2022

Starting in 2022, ProVision Partner’s Cooperative has engaged the services of American Drone, LLC. and Chr. Hansen to perform a variety of services for the cooperative, such as measuring forage on customer farms. By flying overhead, the drone calculates volumes of forage in bunker silos, piles, and bags.

“We’ve always done feed inventories for farmers,” said Steve Heckel, ProVision Livestock Production Specialist. “So guys like me would go out to the farm once or twice a year. We’d look at all the feed they have in inventory, estimate the high moisture corn, corn silage and hailage they have on the farm, and then develop the rations from that. It’s important our beef and dairy producers don’t run out of something before the next forage season.”

Now, that same farm forage inventory is available via drone - providing valuable information to ProVision Partners' feed department.

“The Chr. Hansen pilots fly the drones and do the calculations,” said Heckel. “They fly over our customers’ farms and make measurements even more accurately than we can from the ground.”

Not only does this service improve the quality of information ProVision’s specialists can take back to each farm, but the farmer can also assign values to the forage if he or she has to speak with a banker. He knows what he can sell if he’s long and what he needs to buy if he’s short.

“We are now in our second season of having this drone service available,” said Heckel. “We have 13 specialists on our feed staff and several of us have used this service to date.” 

If you are interested in measuring your on-farm forage with drone technology, contact your ProVision Partners livestock production specialist or feed mill.