2.2.2 Livestock monitoring in France

I'm Adrien Lebreton. I'm a project manager in PLF, Precision Livestock Farming, in Edell. Edell is a non-profit research organisation appointed by the French Ministry of Agriculture to perform applied research for livestock sectors. I'm part of a PLF team. This team is developing new digital solutions and assessing the impact of those solutions on the daily life of livestock farmers. The biggest regulatory challenge in livestock monitoring is the fact that the pilot has to keep the drones in their visual line of sight. So practically, the drone cannot go further than 500 metres away. So that's a big limit because the farmers want to monitor the animals that are far away. If you want to go further, it's big on visual line of sight regulation. It is possible, but you need more training. You need more certification. And sometimes, you need more paperwork. So it's not that easy to implement for livestock farmers. So maybe, sometimes we can imagine like a big loss beyond visual line of sight, a flight regulation adapted to low risk areas such as pastures. Recently, the European Union built a framework of different flight operations. The first one is open category. It's dedicated to low risk operations of drones. And it was really a progress because before that framework, everything was it is for leisure, or it is for business. So when we're using drones for livestock monitoring activities, it was for business. So it was needed to have certain certification that are very hard to obtain for livestock farmers. So, European Union, with its open category framework, have simplified a lot the implementation of drones in livestock activities. However, we are still in a period of transition between national regulation and European regulation. So there are still older rules, and it's very hard for livestock farmers to understand, oh, I am in France. So I have the European Open category framework. But I have also old rules that I cannot fly at night, that I cannot fly in the city. So in one or two years when the transition will be fully done between national regulation to European regulation, it will be easier for all the real-world stakeholders to implement drones. My advice for future users of drones in livestock application would be there is this nice framework. This is the open category European framework. It's easy to use, easy to implement. You can't do everything, but you can do a lot of things. So, project yourself in it. And then if your business is increasing, maybe you can project yourself on more complex drone operation, like specified operation or certified operation. But that's - you have to start somewhere, and start with the open category.