Remote sensing technologies, including new drone technologies, are developing rapidly
and emerging onto the marketplace. These technologies may provide grass quality and
quantity information to support grassland management. This concept was developed and
evaluated in a collaborative research project (GrassQ) across four EU countries. In regions
where silage forms a significant portion of cow diet, the timing of the first and subsequent
silage cuts is critical. Monitoring of sward quality parameters, height and dry matter (DM),
by drones/satellites can be used to identify the optimum harvest times. Alternatively,
where pasture grazing systems are common, monitoring of herbage yield/mass is critical
to optimise precise herbage allocation to the herd. Drone and satellite technologies were
used to capture this grass yield and quality over two growing seasons in Finland, Ireland,
Denmark and Switzerland. A cloud based service and mobile application, allowing access
and interpretation of these data was developed as a grassland management support tool.
The prototype GrassQ management support system, incorporating drone and satellite data,
analysis, modelling and visualisation tools, hosted on the cloud and application to provide
Grassland information management service were presented to farmers in the different
countries to evaluate in terms of usefulness, importance and robustness. This paper reports
on the evaluation. Generally, satellite technologies were considered in a positive light,
having the ability to streamline grassland management at farm level. Drone technology
was considered as having potential to provide good yield estimates, while the application
had potential to provide easy access to grassland management support information.