Stephen Guerin: PGG Wrightson CEO on the development that could combine AI and drones to count livestock

Farmers could be about to get a new technological tool to help count stock. 

Farm suppliers PGG Wrightson have teamed up with Inde Technology to use drones and AI to make the process faster and easier. 

It works by having drones fly across the paddocks and the resulting footage is run through an AI scanner to count the stock. 

PGG Wrightson CEO Stephen Guerin told Mike Hosking it's getting up to about 97% accuracy in the first runs.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Bit of tech, speaking of tech to make life easier.
This time on the farm got a new drone with
a bit of AI technology makes counting stock easier. Apparently
they call it Skycount project. Stephen Gerrin is PGG writes
and CEO and he's with as Stephen morning for hand
not at all. So you're involved or your companies involved
in this? So is this an expansion into tech for

(00:21):
your company? So it's more than gum boots and feed
or what.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
We've always been a bit more than gun boots and
feed as time has developed, Mike, But this is a
new innovation for us because we can previously our innovations
around online training for our lavestock and our application. But
this is a new piece of kit for us and
we've developed in a partment within the and Microsoft. So

(00:45):
we're really pleased to launch it to the market at
the phield days and June.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
How much drone and how much AI.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
The drone does the initial count so we using high
definition cameras there. We've tried a number of technologies, but
READ doesn't seem to do the work. You can't really
distinguish between sometimes between a tractor sitting in a field
and a water trough, et cetera versus a sheep, and
that's quite important for the farm, and they don't want
to count the sheep, not the tractors. So we've we

(01:12):
take the fly the drone across the paddock. You've got
to be very conscious about a lot disturbing the animals,
and that's really what this is about, making not interrupting
the workflow what's going on on farm. And then the
drone comes back to base and then we run it
through a scanner AI kit. It is counting as it goes,

(01:35):
but we do have to verify some things because the
AI is still learning technology.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
That was next question, where do you reconniize that right here,
right now versus where it might be next year or
the year after.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
In terms of this, we're getting up to ninety seven
percent accuracy in the first passes. We getting up. We're
climbing up to ninety nine in some areas. But sheep
seemed to be a bit harder because they tend to
hide and scrub and so forth. So but dery cattle
we can get you know, pretty really close to one
hundred percent accuracy, you know, ninety nine percent plus right now.

(02:08):
So that's that's you questioned about a year's time. We'll
advance even further beyond that as we do more, more
more runs across farms, Plectuan hill country areas fantastic.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
We'll stay in touch on it. Well done, Stephen Garan,
who is worth PGG writing for more from the mic
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