Sky’s the limit for Queensland grazier’s drone mustering technology

Across the vast expanse of Australia’s north and west, aerial mustering is an essential service for many livestock enterprises. Overwhelmingly performed by helicopter, it’s a high stakes game of ‘cat and mouse;’ the chopper offering an unrivalled advantage in locating stock and applying pressure to get them moving. 

For livestock producers, it’s an expensive undertaking – with contractors costing on average $500 per hour. And for pilots operating in difficult low altitude flying conditions, it is a risky one. Between 2010 and 2023, 133 incidents (including fatalities) were reported to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.  

Enter: Luke Chaplain, a fourth-generation north Queensland grazier on a mission to empower livestock producers to modernise mustering. And save time, money, and lives in the process.  

Off the back of international media coverage of his world-first live remote drone muster in Queensland, Luke shares how SkyKelpie is quite literally soaring to new heights.  

Q: You’d been trialling drone mustering on your family’s farm since about 2017. How did you get from a paddock in Cloncurry, to international news?

I’d already been working with Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) looking at working with multinationals to validate drones in mustering. But when one of those companies pulled out, I put my hand up and founded SkyKelpie. 

Together with the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (AgriFutures evoke^AG. 2025 partner), we did trials across different terrain and different animals, to try and work out what was possible with current technology, under current regulations.  

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The results were good: drones improved safety, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness – and the animals reacted well.  

Luke Chaplain, Founder, SkyKelpie.

Q: A big, noisy helicopter is quite different to a buzzing, little drone. How do the animals respond?

It’s just another form of pressure, like a horse or motorbike. We put pressure on the animals, and once they react the way we want them to, we give them a release of that pressure. 

But animal are animals. When dealing with young or uneducated animals, you might not have success the first time – just as you mightn’t with a horse or a motorbike. And that’s why educating your animals to this new form of pressure is so important.  

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Q: Is education and training something SkyKelpie offers?

Definitely. We recommend and sell technology suited to a particular enterprise. But in terms of big barriers to adoption, we also need to upskill operators in how to use it.  

We hold drone mustering schools and deliver training courses in everything from drone technology and flying skills to animal behaviour and stockmanship – working with stockmanship experts in Australia on our various stockhandling methods. And we’re soon launching a world-first virtual mustering game to help producers master drone mustering from their loungeroom. 

Over 100,000, head of livestock have been mustered by clients who’ve become capable and confident through our training, technology and expert advice.  

Q: This might sound a bit Pied Piper, but can you teach animals to follow the drone?

To a certain extent, for sure. When I’m mustering with Dad, he’ll focus on the tail, and I’ll be in the yards using the drone to poke around applying pressure on the lead. The animals learn the drone isn’t a huge threat, but a presence; that they can walk towards it, and it’ll stay at a distance to them, keeping them at a walk. 

You can also use association techniques. If you feed your animals simultaneously with launching the drone, you bet they’ll follow their gut.  

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Q: What does your dad make of it?

He relies on it now. I’ll head out with the thermal drone at 4am. By sunrise, I’ve found the cattle and moved them to the watering points – and within record time, we’ve got them in the yards.   

A huge value that our customers up north get with the thermal drone is locating animals and moving them in the early hours of the morning, well before the heat sets in. 

Q: Where are we at with regulation of drones on farm? Is it still a barrier?

Unmanned aerial vehicles come under Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA). CASA already provides an exclusion in the regulations which allows a landholder to fly without a license if they keep the drone within visual line of sight. But for big operations, that’s not always practical.  

You can gain accreditation to operate beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), which I did as part of the trials. But it’s an expensive, detailed, and complicated process. So, SkyKelpie is trying to gather enough data to show the regulator that there are a lot of net benefits to drone mustering, and that requiring producers to keep a constant visual line of sight will limit adoption.  

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An emerging tech called a docking station could change the game by removing battery life as a constraint – giving the drone a place to land, recharge, and take off as programmed. 

If you have connectivity on both ends – at the docking station and where the pilot is situated – a producer can operate that drone from anywhere in the world, as I demonstrated from the Gold Coast shifting cattle on Queensland’s Southern Downs. That’s just another reason why we want to work with the regulator to bring about a change in visual line of sight.

Q: Because these properties can stretch into the thousands (or 100,000s) of hectares.

With the technology available right now, we’re not going to be replacing helicopters doing 20,000-acre paddocks. Yet even within those 20,000-acre paddocks, you can be putting a thermal drone up and scouting a quarter of the paddock to see where the cattle are, or where feral animals are, to then direct the helicopter.  

The benefits are huge, including avoiding fuel and pilot costs and necessary maintenance; and better safety and efficiency because we can manage some livestock movements from the ground.

It’s not just small operators who understand the benefits drone technology offers, either. And the technology is getting better every day. 

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Luke Chaplain at evokeᴬᴳ⋅ 2024.

Q: What will shift the needle on adoption?

Primary production is a tough business model. Weather, commodity prices, regulation; a lot is out of our control. But what is in our control is minimising the cost of production. And drone technology can help with that.  

Farmers get a bad rap for being slow on tech adoption, but I don’t agree with that. Farmers are businesspeople; if something can clearly demonstrate value to their business, they’ll adopt it.  

The challenge for us is to advocate for this solution – so farmers understand the many use cases. 

Q. evoke^AG. 2025 is coming to your home state, landing in Brisbane on 18-19 February 2025. What’s got you excited?

I’ve been to two evoke^AG. events now, and while it’s important that we have producers in the room, I see it as a very good B2B event.  

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At the end of the day, every founder wants to build their business to be valuable to customers. Say you’ve got a really good idea and you’ve done customer discovery, or you’ve got market traction but B2B opportunities could enhance it; events like evoke^AG. can unlock those strategic partnerships and benefit both the solution, and the industry.  

And isn’t that what we all want?