Farming

How AI and satellites are used to detect illegal manure spreading

How AI and satellites are used to detect illegal manure spreading

After a fresh February snow, a satellite about the size of a shoebox, busy snapping photographs as it circuited the planet at 17,000 miles per hour, captured something dark in Wisconsin.

About 56 tons of livestock bedding and manure had been spread atop Mark Zinke’s frozen alfalfa field.

The image eventually appeared on the computers of Stanford University researchers, who relayed it to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Zinke, a Brownsville dairy farmer who cares for a herd of more than 1,300 cows, had forgotten about the whole thing until he later heard from the agency.

“Oh s—,” he recalled thinking at the time. “I guess we f—ed up. We gotta man up to it, right?”

Imagery collected by inexpensive satellites is ushering in an era of real-time monitoring. Some environmental advocates want the department to look down from the sky as it regulates livestock manure, a potential water contamination source.a

New England – New York Sheep Craze – 1840

New England - New York Sheep Craze - 1840

If you ever wonder why there is so many stone walls in the woods, the answer is the Merino Sheep Craze of the 1830s, when the ultra-soft, itch-free Merino wool reached a record breaking price of 57 cents/pound in 1835.
 
During the height of the Sheep Craze there was over one million sheep in Vermont, and 271,000 sheep in Rutland County alone -- and in Addison County more then 350 sheep per square mile. Forests were cleared, stones pulled out of fields and pilled up as fence rows to keep sheep in.