Accurate feed inventory management is crucial for dairy producers and nutritionists to optimize ration formulation, improve herd performance, and meet lender requirements. In this episode of Ruminate This, discover how drone technology is transforming feedstuff inventory by providing safer, faster, and more precise measurements of corn silage and haylage piles.
Chad Christensen, West Region Business Development Manager at Agrarian Solutions, explains how drone-based inventory eliminates the risks associated with manual pile measurement while delivering reliable data that supports better feeding decisions and financial reporting.
Beyond regional drone services, Agrarian Solutions offers a suite of value-added services designed to identify challenges and boost dairy profitability. Dairy producers and nutritionists seeking smarter feed inventory solutions won’t want to miss this episode.
🎧 Listen now to set your herd up for lifelong success!
Scott Zehr
Hey, welcome everybody to another edition of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host, Scott Zehr. And today I get to bring in one of my friends here at Agrarian, Chad Christensen, my counterpart in the western region.
Chad is the Western Region Business Development Manager, and heck of a guy. He’s been here a lot of years. What is it now, Chad, like 15, 12?
Chad Christensen
Well, 10, a little over 10 with Agrarian full-time, but there was some…
Scott Zehr
Okay.
Chad Christensen
A lot of part-time prior to that as well.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. So you’ve seen a lot of things evolve in the nutrition world for sure. And today we’re gonna be visiting with Chad about different value added services that we offer here at Agrarian for the folks that choose to partner with us. I almost call it, you know, one of the perks.
And you know, Chad, I think one of the things that’s neat about Agrarian is that we don’t really take a cookie cutter approach to our value added services. So what we’re gonna talk about today is your use of drone technology. And it’s something that I don’t offer up here because I’m, I don’t know, maybe a slow learner or not as techie or whatever you want to call it. But tell us about the drone services we offer. Maybe starting with how do we even get into this?
Chad Christensen
Well, really how I got into it was I’d been seeing it out and about in the field hearing about it. What really decided to make me pull the trigger to go figure this out and learn, ’cause this was a hundred percent self-taught on what I did here.
But, I was at a dairy that was looking at the current product they were feeding for mycotoxin control. And it was your typical binder, right? And everybody’s got their doubts now. Everybody understands that they’re just not as effective as they once thought they were. Research is backing that obviously. And, our main staple product DTX of course is not a binder. We’ve got solid research behind it, and as we were meeting with a dairy, it was about a 2000 cow dairy. We were sitting across the table from the dairymen and the nutritionist and the nutritionist says, “Hey, this stuff sounds pretty cool, I’m on board. But here’s the deal.
If we pull that binder out, that company’s not gonna fly your piles anymore.” And the dairyman is like, “huh, I need that.” So we got into that conversation. What do we need it for? Well, we need to know really how much feed we have sitting out here. Right?
But it got in deeper. The banker was interested in knowing what they had for inventory when it come time to, to meet with their accountant. They needed to be able to report and they needed to show something on paper what they really had for value sitting on the ground.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Chad Christensen
That you, you just think, “Hey, it’s just feed.: But it’s bigger than that. Right. It’s one of the biggest expenses on the dairy.
And they needed to have an eyeball on, on what they had and what they owned and, what they were had for plans. So the biggest question is when are we gonna run out of feed so we can figure out how fast or how slow we’re gonna feed this up to get us to a certain date. But it is bigger than that. And it’s just a way of to manage the dairy, again.
And in most cases it’s the nutritionist job to kind of figure out them estimates. What we have when we’re gonna run out. Very accurate to grab the wheel, walk the piles, get the tape, measure out, figure out the height, the width, the length, all the stuff. But it’s another job, right?
Scott Zehr
Well, it is. But it’s, I get nervous when I see people walking on piles.
Chad Christensen
Yeah.
Scott Zehr
I mean, you know, I, I see some of these piles, Chad. They can be, you know maybe a nice drive over pile might be 12, 14 feet, but man, some of these guys are putting up, you know piles. there’s a picture floating around somewhere I should try to find it. The pile was 38 feet high and there is a tractor sitting on top of that pile. Somebody was actually driving up there and it’s like, it just toggles my mind.
Chad Christensen
Yeah. It’s just a big, big part of the business, right of the dairy and…
Scott Zehr
Yep. I mean, it’s the biggest asset on the dairy too.
Chad Christensen
Oh yeah. Yep, yep. And feed in the ration and what we’re gonna do with it, that changes things instantly on what they’re getting for production, reproduction, and herd health, everything along with it.
So the idea came kind of from that story was well, I’m a hands-on guy, right? You don’t see me on your podcast very often, right, Scott? That not me. I, I’m, I’d rather be out and about and hands-on and I thought, this is pretty cool. I could learn this technology. It took a fair amount of, of hours of studying.
The FAA requires a test, they call Part 1-0-7. So a lot of YouTube videos, a lot of sample quizzes, just a lot, a lot of hours to get studying for a, for a test that really was mostly unrelated to what I really used my drone for.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Chad Christensen
Some, some of the questions was needed was nothing of any interest to me. And yep, I’m coming up here next spring on my, on needing to get relicensed again, and I’m not looking forward to sitting down and relearning all the airport signage. When you’re cruising down that runway and you see all these different signs on a runway, there’s certain colors, there’s certain numbers mean this and mean that.
None of that has any interest to me. I don’t use that when I’m out and about on farms, but it’s part of the test.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Chad Christensen
So you really gotta know a lot more than you really need to, but you, you gotta have that test. Yeah. So you can get your, carry your card.
Scott Zehr
What areas of the country are you serving with the, with the drone inventory management program?
Chad Christensen
Yeah. Currently I’m flying piles for nutritionists in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota is really where I’ve been primarily at.
Scott Zehr
Yep.
Chad Christensen
Right around my home base, obviously. And that’s where I have my biggest clientele.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Chad Christensen
Yeah.
Scott Zehr
So with the feed site program obviously we’re, we’re using the drone to capture length, width, height of the pile, right? And you’re typing in the feed stuff, whether it’s corn silage, whether it’s haylage. How do we calculate the density? How does that, ’cause that’s a big part of what you actually have in your pile.
Chad Christensen
That’s huge. Right? Because backup a little bit, I have a subscription with a company I use, I use a company called DroneDeploy. Okay. This is a company that they, they offer these, this type of technology and it’s huge in the agriculture business. Right. But the oil and gas business uses these guys construction owners, that sort of thing, whether they’re putting up a skyscraper, there’s a ton of technology out there utilizing drones.
I, of course, use it for flying piles. The subscription that I have with this company, I mean, I don’t utilize it as much as I could or should. If I was in the agronomy side, I could be doing stand counts flying fields. Looking at literal stand counts, and it’ll give you that. So when I’m flying piles, if you will, kind of a generic term, but I might set up this pre-planned flight.
I typically do all that from home using GPS mapping, and I set my points when I get to a dairy. I then double check my points by walking or driving around. And utilizing the app on my phone, setting the parts where I want, what I wanna fly. Sometimes it’s a half an acre, sometimes it’s five acres. And wherever these piles are at, preplanned flight, set up the grid, I guess if you will, where this drone is gonna do its autonomous flight and that I set the height of the drone into the air, how high it’s gonna fly, and it calculates how many photos it’s gonna take.
So flights can last anywhere from three minutes to 30 minutes depending on the size we’re gonna be flying. And it literally then does an autonomous flight, meaning I hit the start button. Then is all set up ahead of time. It takes off and lands on its own when it’s done. Unless it needs a battery partway through, it’ll come back land. I switch out the battery, hit the start button again. It continues where it left off.
It’ll fly this grid taking anywhere from a hundred to a few hundred photos depending on the size of the flight, and it just takes continuous photos from every angle it possibly can. So it’s really about camera quality on the drone.
The drone, I got’s fairly small, but it’s a good camera quality. You see some of these agronomy companies now that the drone takes a pickup to haul it in the back of the bed, right? That’s not me. It’s a little one and it’s about camera quality, so. Takes hundreds of photos. They’re just in JPEGs. And then when I get home, I upload ’em to my, my account and it usually takes about a day for that to spit back a report and it’ll give me cubic yards.
When I go in, I set some parameters on say a, a pile and it could be a sand pile. It doesn’t care, it doesn’t know what this is, right? It could be anything, rock, sand, in this case feed, right? I go around the greater and it’ll gimme cubic yards of what I have, so. Density and moisture are not a factor at that point. Right.
Then I have a calculator that I have set up where I enter that density and that moisture, because that’s the big factor where this could be inaccurate.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Chad Christensen
So, where I work with the nutritionist, as I say, Hey, what’s the moisture of that haage or corn silage we’re looking for the dry matter actually what we’re looking for.
Scott Zehr
Right.
Chad Christensen
And that’s gonna be. How effective it can be, I guess, on the accuracy. And then what is our density? How hard is it packed? Right. A good example, I had a dairy, we thought we were gonna run out of feed in October, so we started making adjustments, but they got to the middle of this pile and it was like hitting a brick wall. The density got much, much harder. So they had a lot more feed per cubic feet than they did on the outer edges. What did we learn?
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Chad Christensen
Where did their pack tractor spend their time? They packed the heck outta the center and then that slowed down the amount of feet they were feeding up a day ’cause all that feed was there. We ended up running out of feed on that pile in December, not September.
Scott Zehr
You know, that’s, that’s an interesting point. It’s like you’re auditing the, the quality of your pack tractors too, right?
Chad Christensen
Yep.
Scott Zehr
You know, you’re, you, you figure out where, where they’re spending all their time and where they’re needing to improve.
Chad Christensen
Yeah. And as the, as the harvest moved along the pack tractor guy probably should have been the guy calling the shots, but he maybe wasn’t, but he should have said, we need to slow down a little bit. I gotta catch up on the edges.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Chad Christensen
Didn’t happen. They were able to do the center really nicely.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Chad Christensen
A lot of time there. But the feed kept coming in and coming in and coming in and they needed to pack everything else better.
Scott Zehr
I have a friend of mine that has a custom harvest business and he is, he’s the chopper guy. And he likes to push, push, push. And I, I pick on him now it’s like, Hey, you know who’s running the pack tractor?
They’re the ones that get to tell you how many loads you can bring in at a time. You know? And but to the guy, to the guy in the chopper, it’s all about, Hey, can we get a hundred loads today? Can we get, you know, 150 dump truck loads today? How much can we actually get chopped off? And it’s the old saying, right, Chad haste makes waste.
Chad Christensen
Yep.
Scott Zehr
Yep. Going back to why I think the cookie cutter approach is not something we really take here at Agrarian when it comes to our value add services. You know, you showed this interest in the drone technology. I mean, the company got behind it.
It’s a great service that we’re offering. Again, it’s, I think I misspoke earlier and said that feed is your biggest asset. It’s certainly one of your biggest assets as a dairyman. The nutritionist that you’re offering the service through, what type of feedback are you getting from them?
Chad Christensen
For the most part, you know, you only hear something if they think it’s off. And the funny thing is of one of a good example is I had a guy say, “I think I got way more feed than that.” And the nutritionist sent the report to the dairy men, and the dairy men shared it with his custom harvester. And of course, the custom harvester’s got a brand new chopper with a new scale on it, right.
Weighing it as it’s going through the chopper and oh no, we got way more feed than that. You’re off. You’re off. And then we started feeding it up. And I ran into that guy and he says, it ticks me off that you were right. I paid a lot for that scale on that chopper. So, but it still comes down to the is the density consistent to the whole pile?
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Chad Christensen
Is the moisture consistent through the whole pile or do we have rations? ‘Cause it all changes, right? You have to be able to allow for some of that. But…
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Chad Christensen
For the most part, it’s pretty accurate. In a perfect world, a perfect pile is a drive over pile on nice flat blacktop where it’s just literally what’s on that blacktop is what you’re measuring and nothing else.
Now, is that realistic on every dairy? The subscription with this company. I mean, when, when we go around and we measure this pile, we’re measuring everything. So if they’ve got 20 feet of tires in the air, it doesn’t know the difference, so.
Scott Zehr
Yeah
Chad Christensen
You see some different odds shaped piles. You see some piles into a hillside, you know, where does the wall end? Does the wall straight up and down? Is it angled? There’s some variability when you get into situations like that. Not every, every dairy has a perfect situation, like I said, with just a flat, nice, smooth blacktop and drive over piles from every side where you’re just literally measuring a mound. So, we have to be able to factor for a lot of that kind of stuff as well. So.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Chad Christensen
Yeah.
Scott Zehr
You know, I think one of the neat takeaways as you’ve kind of developed this program here at Agrarian, what our Feed Site Program is what we call it is obviously there’s times where, like you said, that 2000 cow dairy it was a way for us to demonstrate value on the front end and let DTX speak for itself.
Chad Christensen
I think my, one of my biggest points was we, we have all the confidence in the world that every dairy is gonna be better off feeding DTX versus feeding a binder. Right? The results are there, the research is there. Feeding binders in many cases are doing more harm than good. Don’t feed a binder because somebody offers you a service like this. I can help you out.
Scott Zehr
Well, no, that, that’s a great point. And I, I would just kind of really encourage people to take what you just said and think hard about it. I mean, go back and listen to some of our earlier episodes here on this podcast discussing the research from the Kahal et all group out there in Spain. There’s a lot of nutrients represented in the feed piles that you’re flying and, when we’re working with clay-based products or yeast cell wall based products, there’s a lot less nutrients available to the cows when they’re mixed in with the feed.
Chad Christensen
Yep.
Scott Zehr
So I, I think to me, when I think about what you’ve done, like, that’s one of the biggest takeaways I think I have from that whole thing is we talk a lot about like nutrient allocation, right? And, feeding DTX to reduce inflammation makes more nutrients available for the cow for productive purposes. And you’re literally showing the dairyman the nutritionist, how many nutrients, how many tons of nutrients are in the pile.
Chad Christensen
Yep.
Scott Zehr
And we can show with research that we can bind up a lot of those nutrients. So, I applaud you for it, because it’s, something that, you know, I looked at doing and it just, it just didn’t click for me.
I guess one other question that I was thinking about here, if you had 30 seconds with a nutritionist to really drive home, you know, what are the three things as to the true advantages to using Chad with his drone technology to do inventory?
Chad Christensen
Well, you know, I set this up as a service for working with us, right? We offer a heck of a service by covering a lot of the costs to nutritionists at Dairyland Labs, right? Every nutritionist is using a lab to sample everybody’s feed. You work with us, we’ll help you out. We’ll cover some of them costs.
This is just another way for me to provide a service that helps them look good in front of their customers. So rarely do I go, I don’t ever go to a dairy and pitch that, Hey, I’d love to come fly your piles. No, my audience is the nutritionist. They bring me to the dairies. They support me.
They then support the product line because of that. So, as I mentioned earlier, the very first thing the nutritionist mentioned, well, these guys won’t fly your piles if you switch over to the DTX product. I just walked out of there saying, well, heck, I can do that. And I didn’t care at that point if the company supported me or not. I was buying a drone and I was gonna learn because I could be more valuable on a farm.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, Chad, I think that’s just a great example. You know, everything that you described, like the backend work that goes into this, the technology that goes into it, I think is incredible. And it’s just another demonstration of how new technology is able to provide value to the dairy and to the nutritionist.
Right. And again, I, I think that’s one of the great perks of working with us at Agrarian. You know, it’s about utilizing your skillset. It’s about how does Chad Christensen brings value to the folks that he works with? And I, I just think it’s a neat program. So kudos for you for kicking it off.
Chad Christensen
Yeah, it’s been, it’s been really good. I do believe it’s helped our relationship a lot here in this, my part of the world, at least with nutritionists. And like I said earlier, that’s my audience. So, and when they reach out for help, you know, they wanna work with you.
Scott Zehr
All right. Well, hey folks, if you wanna get a hold of Chad Christensen, I’m not gonna drop his personal contact here on the episode. But Chad, once again, tell us again what states you’re covering in particular.
Chad Christensen
Yep. So I am spending most of my time flying pals currently in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota.
Scott Zehr
All right, so folks, if you’re in that region and you wanna get more information from Chad, give us a shout out in an email that’s gonna be [email protected]. We’ll get you in touch with Chad. And you can pick his brain more. Again, that’s [email protected].
Chad, I want to thank you for taking time outta your day today to come visit with us on Ruminate This. I know this is probably one of the most fun things you’ve done in the last couple of months. But I’ll give you a quick parting word. What you want people to remember about our conversation today?
Chad Christensen
Just that Agrarian Solutions we wanna stay flexible and easy to work with you and, and support you in any way we can.
Scott Zehr
I like it. I like it. All right, well thanks Chad. I’ll let you get off the hot seat and we’ll catch everybody with another episode of Ruminate This coming up soon. Thanks.
Chad Christensen
Thanks, Scott.
