From Collars to Cameras: How AI Is Rewiring Livestock Monitoring in 2026
Why a drone-and-vision guy cares about cows
Most of my work sits at the intersection of computer vision, drones, and edge inference: vision-only navigation for GPS-denied flight, detection pipelines, pose estimation for controlling machines with the human body. For a while I treated agriculture as "someone else's domain."
That changed when I started noticing that every hard problem I was working on had an almost exact twin on a farm.
Tracking a small object across frames in poor light? That's counting animals in a barn at 4 a.m. Estimating volume from a single RGB image plus a depth model? That's estimating a cow's body weight without putting her on a scale. Reading human body pose to infer intent? That's reading a cow's gait to detect lameness before she limps visibly. Flying a drone autonomously over terrain with no infrastructure? That's mustering cattle across a million-acre station.
Livestock monitoring isn't a...
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