New GPS collars on livestock are changing farming and helping the environment in more ways than you might expect.
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00:00 I think it's really gonna revolutionize
00:01 the way that livestock are managed
00:03 once this technology becomes widespread and mainstream.
00:06 - New technology is changing the way farmers
00:08 at one Northern Virginia farm manage their livestock.
00:11 - We've been doing rotational grazing with them
00:13 since the beginning, but the GPS collars
00:16 are a new way of doing that, basically.
00:18 - Solar-powered GPS collars help Molly Crois
00:21 and her husband, Sam, keep track of their goats
00:23 and move them around in an environmentally sustainable way.
00:26 - Moving animals around throughout the grazing season
00:30 to allow regrowth of the plant matter
00:33 before you bring them back on there to eat it again.
00:35 And that promotes soil health
00:37 and promotes having good, diverse pastures,
00:40 which then reduce runoff in times of rainfall.
00:43 - Runoff that can contaminate nearby water sources,
00:45 such as the Chesapeake Bay,
00:47 where George's Mill Farm is located.
00:49 - The problem with that is that they tend to trample
00:51 the stream bank and erode away the bank,
00:55 killing the vegetation along the bank
00:56 and all of that leads to more soil runoff
00:58 and nutrient runoff into the waterway,
01:00 which then eventually ends up in the bay.
01:02 And so you end up with a lot of nutrient pollution from that.
01:04 - The collars help keep the farm clean, too.
01:07 - The poop that the animals are producing
01:08 out into the pastures naturally,
01:10 rather than having animals in confinement
01:12 where they're in a little area, like a feedlot,
01:15 where all the poop has to then be disposed of
01:16 or it washes away every time it rains.
01:19 - The new tech has Crois feeling hopeful
01:21 about the future of farming.
01:22 - Learning more about how we can use the system
01:25 better work with the goats behavior and their grazing
01:27 and better manage the land,
01:28 which is better for the land and better for the animals.
01:30 - For AccuWeather, I'm meteorologist Tony Laubach.
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