Automated grazing management

Management-intensive grazing is a grazing management strategy that relies on careful monitoring of animals at pasture and frequent relocation of animals between various regions of the pasture, or paddocks, in order to maximize the nutrients and sustenance the animals obtain through grazing. When applied successfully, this approach to grazing management yields higher animal production, while cutting feed costs; however, a great deal of overhead is introduced in monitoring and moving the animals throughout the pasture, making this approach very difficult to implement at a large scale. Recent successes in the field of dynamic virtual fencing have demonstrated the feasibility of automatically restraining and moving cattle within a pasture, and without the need to build or move fences. This technology may be used to reduce the physical overhead of management-intensive grazing, but it does not address the decision-making aspects. This thesis proposes a decision-making system to be used in conjunction with dynamic virtual fence technology to implement a fully-automated intensive grazing management strategy. The system has been implemented and tested in simulation, and the results thereof are presented and analyzed