How we fly, and what we do with the pictures.
Our software picks out animals, trees on a fence and dirty solar panels. A person releases what it finds before you are shown it.
Opening for commercial work in the first quarter of 2027.
Trained on our own farm first
A model off the shelf has never seen your fence line, or cattle bedded down in brush along it. So we don't use one as it comes. We train ours first on our own farm, Three Waters (opens in a new tab) in Ghent (opens in a new tab). Our cattle, sheep, fences and solar array are flown there the way yours would be. Then every customer job goes into the training set, and the models keep getting better with use.
The models find and score each detection. A person releases what they find before you are shown it, and anything a model isn't sure about gets a closer look first. A wrong answer about your fence at 2am costs you a night's sleep, and maybe an animal.
On a solar inspection, a building or water check, or an estate visit, a person here answers for each place we looked at, and for an estate's grounds as a whole: what we found, nothing found, or that we couldn't see it.
The models
| Trained on | Our own flight imagery, used to fine-tune a general-purpose detector |
| What they find | Livestock species, trees down on a fence and how dirty a solar panel is, with room to add more. A person marks fence breaks and open gates. |
What happens to a picture after the flight
Where it all ends up
The photos, what we found in them and the record of every job end up in The Herdsmen App, which comes with the work.
The app
| Findings | Marked on each photo, so you can check them yourself |
| Map | Where each photo was taken, over a satellite picture of your ground |
| Runs in | The browser on your phone or computer, with nothing to install |
The three drones we fly
Each kind of job starts from a set flight plan. On ranch jobs the drone stays inside a boundary we set. A person can take over any of the three at any time.
DJI Matrice 30T
| Sensing | Wide, zoom, and 640×512 thermal cameras plus a laser rangefinder, all built in |
| Flight | Launched on site with a DJI RC Plus 2, then flies a flight plan on its own, or by hand |
| Accessory | A spotlight and speaker we can fit, for night searches and calling out |
| Used for | Searches, fence sweeps, counts and inspections, brought out to your property |
DJI Matrice 4TD + Dock 3
| Sensing | Wide, zoom and thermal cameras, day or night, like the M30T |
| Flight | Flies itself from its dock, on a schedule or when we start it remotely |
| Connection | Starlink, so it doesn't need your internet |
| Used for | Routine ranch work and inspections from a dock installed on your property, and estate visits, launched by hand or from the dock on our truck |
DJI Agras T100
| Sensing | Phased-array radar and LiDAR to avoid obstacles. No thermal camera. |
| Flight | Launched on site with a DJI RC Plus 2, then flies a flight plan on its own, or by hand |
| Payload | 100 L spray tank (5 to 11 m swath), or a 150 L spreader hopper |
| Positioning | RTK GPS, accurate to the centimeter |
| Used for | Fertilizing and seeding fields, and cleaning solar panels |
The answer first, the record after
A missing animal is a phone call, then a text with a map link to where it is, and a photo when we have one to send. Everything else ends in a report or a record, and an email tells you when it's ready.
Kept as your history
What we find is kept by date and place, so you can follow a fence line, a head count or a roof over time. Each fence sweep is checked against the last one. How long we keep the photos is in the Privacy Policy.
Support is a person
Once we open in the first quarter of 2027, call (518) 227-0028 for a sweep after a storm, or for a copy of everything we hold on your property.