Aurox Featured in Spectrum News

Spectrum News covered Aurox in a 2018 segment focused on how drone-based silage inventory measurement was changing the way dairy farmers track their largest unmeasured cost: feed.

Watch the Spectrum News segment → Aurox Uses Drones to Provide Farmers Valuable Data

Why drone silage measurement made the news

Dairy operates on thin margins. Feed accounts for 50–60% of operating costs on most dairies, and a meaningful share of that feed is lost to shrink — the gap between what was harvested and what reaches the cow. Industry estimates put silage shrink between 5% and 20% on a typical operation, and over 30% on some.

Until recently, the only way to estimate silage inventory was a tape, a probe, and a spreadsheet. The error bars on those measurements were wide enough to obscure the very shrink the dairy was trying to find.

Aurox put a drone in the air, photogrammetry behind the imagery, and surveyed Ground Control Points on the ground — and produced inventory measurements with single-digit-percent accuracy. The Spectrum segment captured the moment when that workflow moved from research project to dairy practice.

What Aurox does now

Since the Spectrum segment aired, Aurox has evolved from a single drone-services concept into three distinct dairy-feed-intelligence products:

SilagePlan

Drone-based silage inventory measurement, plus 2.5D satellite mapping for farms without drones. Tracks volumes, density, shrink, and run-out forecasts across every site. The direct descendant of the work covered in the Spectrum piece — but matured into a complete inventory-management platform.

FeedBunk AI

ML analytics on existing trail-camera footage of dairy feed bunks. Detects feed deliveries, pushup activity, and empty-bunk hours automatically — turning equipment most farms already own into a feed-bunk monitoring system. No new hardware required.

Rumi Walk

A voice-first dairy barn observation app. Walk the pens, dictate observations, and the app transcribes notes, scores nine dairy-specific KPIs (cud chewing, locomotion, body condition, manure score, heat stress, and more), and generates a PDF for the vet or nutritionist. Currently in beta.

What’s changed since 2018

Three things have shifted the environment for drones on dairies:

1. Drone hardware is cheaper and more capable. What required an enterprise-grade aircraft in 2018 now runs on a sub-$2,000 consumer drone with cm-level accuracy when paired with RTK positioning.

2. Photogrammetry software is more accurate. Modern photogrammetry pipelines, when combined with Ground Control Points, produce volumetric measurements that hold up against ground-truth weights consistently within a few percent.

3. Dairy operations have grown. Larger herds and tighter consolidation mean a single percentage point of feed efficiency is a five-figure or six-figure number annually. The economics that justified drone silage measurement at scale in 2018 are even stronger today.

The result is that drone-based silage inventory has gone from press story to standard practice on the larger US and Canadian dairies — and is making its way down-market as cost falls.

Coverage takeaway

The Spectrum piece was about the moment a regional operation introduced precision measurement to a part of the dairy that had relied on guesswork for decades. The work has continued since, and the audience has grown. Press coverage like this segment matters because it broadens the conversation — and because dairies who weren’t otherwise paying attention to silage inventory measurement now are.

Read more: The Importance of Measuring Silage Shrink · Why dairy feed tracking matters · SilagePlan