HeadCount Uses DJI Drones to Count $4,000 Cattle in Kansas

The most expensive cattle in American history are now being counted from the air. HeadCount Inventory, the drone division of Kansas crop consultancy Crop Quest, flies autonomous DJI aircraft over feedyards and delivers head counts the company says hit 99.997% accuracy.

“Nothing is impossible, but getting a whole yard count is close to impossible as you get,” Brandon Depenbusch, vice president of the cattle division at Irsik & Doll Feed Services, declared. “Right now, with drones, we can count a whole feedyard in 40 minutes with an accurate head count.”

Irsik & Doll runs seven feedyards across central and western Kansas with a one-time capacity of 280,000 head, according to the company. At today’s prices, that is more than a billion dollars on the hoof, and somebody has to count it.

One Drone, a Portal and Three Layers of Human Checking

HeadCount sells two versions of the count, and neither one looks like the swarm of science fiction: the documented operation is a single DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise flying a pre-programmed route over the pens while the yard holds still.

For the Full Yard Audit, HeadCount’s own pilots fly the entire operation with their own equipment in two to three hours, according to the company, and the yard pauses cattle movement while the aircraft works. An algorithm makes the first counting pass, then three separate layers of human quality control go through each pen before the report lands within 48 hours.

The subscription service flips the labor. HeadCount’s pilots first build a high resolution, geo-referenced model of the feedyard, and after that the yard picks the pens it wants counted in an online portal, receives the automated flight plan on its own controller, flies the mission and uploads the images for processing.

“We’ve taken something that wasn’t verifiable outside of the human element,” Tyson Johnston, a partner at HeadCount, told Drovers. He compares the drone to the horse: another tool in the same job, with people still checking the result.

The company says the system also inventories feed commodities and ties into Accu Trac, the Micro Technologies software that runs the books at a large share of American feedyards.

The Aircraft Is a DJI, and That Detail Matters

The drone doing this work is a DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise, and HeadCount doesn’t hide it: the company sells a $4,700 bundle on its own website with the aircraft, an RC Pro controller, four batteries and a year of DJI Care Refresh.

That puts one of the quietest corners of American agriculture on a collision course with Washington. I wrote in March about the state of ag drones in the U.S., where DJI aircraft fly roughly 96% of detected agricultural operations while the FCC Covered List debate threatens the pipeline that supplies them.

If there’s one drone I trust with an automated flight plan, it’s the Mavic line. Want one more layer of automation? Swap in a Matrice, drop it in a DJI Dock, and the problem solves itself. This class of aircraft was built for heavy work, and it has spent years proving it.

The result is a supply chain quietly built on hardware that parts of Congress want gone, counting an asset class that has never been worth more.

A $3,900 Steer Turns Counting Into Accounting

The math explains why feedyards pay for decimal points. USDA’s five-area report for the week ended July 5 put steers at $255.12 per hundredweight at an average weight of 1,524 pounds (691 kg), which works out to roughly $3,888 per animal, with heavy lots clearing $4,300.

Those are record numbers. Cash cattle broke $250 for the first time in history in April, and the weekly average has kept setting records since, running near $256 in late June.

Scale that up and the stakes get national. USDA counted 11.68 million head on feed in lots of 1,000 or more as of June 1, about $40 billion worth of livestock standing in pens at current prices, with 2.42 million of those head in Kansas alone. A counting error of 1% across that inventory misplaces more than $400 million.

“If there’s any inventory or accounting issue, we have to find that as soon as we can because the dollar per animal is pretty high,” Depenbusch says.

The labor case was made before the price case. Feedlot Magazine reported in 2022 that Kirkland Feedyard cut counting from 12 man-hours a week to about eight a month after adopting the system, and the drone’s still images beat a live count for a simple reason Depenbusch points out: it’s easier to count stuff that is standing still.

From Research Paper to Feedyard Routine

Counting animals from the air has been an academic problem for years. DroneXL covered the LSNET research on automated animal counting in June 2025, and the small-scale version of this story in 2024, when a Missouri farmer checked his herd by drone. HeadCount, developing the technology since 2018 and commercial since 2021, is what that work looks like with an invoice attached.

The company has stayed almost invisible while doing it. The Drovers feature is the first major cattle-media coverage of HeadCount in roughly three and a half years, even as its drones flew demos at an Irsik & Doll yard in Ingalls this April for the next generation of feeders.

DroneXL’s Take

What’s left in the pens is the most honest drone business case I’ve covered this year: an animal worth $3,888 counted by an aircraft that costs $4,700, with the count checked three times by humans because at these prices nobody trusts a machine alone.

One of those delicious steers covers most of the $4,700 drone that will count the rest, and the drone will be on the payroll years after the steer is gone. At these prices it’s hard to imagine anyone reaching for another brand to do this work. DJI wins this one going away.

While Congress debates the ban, these aircraft just keep clocking in. Nobody makes a cattle count go viral, but it pays the invoice every month, and DJI keeps doing the unglamorous work Skydio walked away from when it left this end of the market.

Photo credit: HeadCount, DJI.