Noam Azran is a real live cowboy. He spent a decade on horseback patrolling the vast cattle ranches of California and Argentina.

And now he heads an Israeli tech startup that uses drones — instead of traditional cowboys — to monitor the welfare of millions of cows.

BeeFree Agro has just delivered its first fleet of “autonomous flying cowboys” to a paying customer.

They’re the eyes in the sky that will transform the way the world’s beef cattle are farmed, says Azran.

“I find it hard to believe in 10 years from now there will be commercial livestock growers who won’t be using the system,” he says.

It’s a conservative industry, he acknowledges, but the benefits of using drones are compelling.

“We’re addressing a very simple problem,” he says, speaking at his office in Yokneam, northwest Israel. 

“It’s hard to raise livestock and it’s much harder to get accurate data on what’s going on.”

Finding the problem

He says fixing problems – for example, a food or water shortage, a hole in the fence, a difficult calving, an animal trapped in a fence — is the easy bit.

The hard part is spotting the problem in the first place, because there are so many cattle spread out over vast, sprawling pastures.

“The problem is finding the problems,” he says. “When you talk about cows, especially in Israel, people think of a dairy farm, which means they’re all in a cowshed and you just do your thing there.”

But at least nine out of 10 cows on the planet are bred for meat, not milk.

“I’m working with beef cattle, which can mean two or three thousand animals spread over many, many square kilometers. So just identifying the problem is the hardest part,” says Azran.

And there aren’t enough personnel to patrol ranches these days, whether on horseback or in vehicles.

“It used to be that you were born on a ranch [and] you spent your life building up these skills, but today, there’s a huge shortage of skilled manpower in agriculture in general, and in livestock more so.”

That’s where the drones can help. 

Monitoring every cow

Azran shows me live feeds from drones flying 30-minute missions over a ranch in Brazil, the world’s biggest beef-producing country after the United States.

The high-resolution pictures show the precise GPS location of every single cow, providing an exact count. 

“I can check my fences, I can check my water troughs, I can check my water infrastructure. Today we’re also doing analysis of animal behavior,” says Azran.

“We work both in pasture and in the feedlots,” the enclosed areas where calves spend the first six to eight months with their mothers.

The drone images show the livestock manager exactly what’s going on. If there’s food left over, it could be because some of the animals are sick. 

If a cow has separated herself from the herd, it could be because she’s calving. Azran can zoom in to check. If she’s lying on her side, then she probably is. If she’s standing or lying on her front, she isn’t. 

If the cattle are crowded around the water trough, it’s probably because there’s a problem with the water system.

No exhaustion or vacations

The drones monitor everything without getting tired. They don’t get sick, they don’t complain, they don’t demand pay rises. They work day and night. 

They’re autonomous, which means they go and do what they’re supposed to do without being told.

Azran first used drones on a cattle farm 12 years ago. He thought it would help, and he was right. But it was a haphazard affair. Drones would crash sometimes and they’d take overlapping pictures making it impossible to properly understand what was happening.

Drones were the way to go, he decided, but they needed some sophisticated software to work effectively. 

And that was how Azran the cowboy set out on the journey to becoming Azran the CEO of BeeFree Agro.

The drones the company uses are standard off-the-shelf models. It’s the software that makes them special. The research and development team developed artificial intelligence, machine learning, and image analysis that provides livestock managers with all the data they need.

A billion beef cattle

The system went live in January with its first paying customers in Brazil, where it currently manages around 3 million cattle.

That’s a drop in the ocean – there are almost a billion beef cattle in the world. 

As the world’s population multiplies, demand for beef is expected to double by 2050.

But Azran says they’re on board with three of the “big four” multinational meat processors — JBS, Marfrig, Cargill and Minerva- – that jointly control at least three quarters of global beef production.

“We’re working with the three based in Brazil; we’re at different stages from ongoing trials right now or we’re in commercial negotiations after trials.”

He also says that in terms of technology, BeeFree is at least five years ahead of its closest rivals, which puts a small startup – a dozen staff in Israel and $6 million in funding and grants — in a very strong position.  

“There’s nobody in the industry that can do the kind of automation and analysis that we are already doing,” Azran claims.

“We’ve just started with our first paying customers. But these are the biggest customers in the world and so it’s a very fast ramp-up from where we are now to hopefully by the end of the year taking over a good portion of the industry, at least in Brazil.”

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