Growing up on a cattle operation in Australia, Sam Rogers spent a lot of evenings waiting for his dad to come home. That ranching rhythm of early starts, late finishes, and constant risk was just “how it’s always been done.” Sam watched it and quietly decided it shouldn’t have to stay that way.
Unlike a lot of kids in northern Australia, Sam’s real passion wasn’t horsepower or ranch work; it was robotics and code. While his dad worried about broken axles and busted shoulders, Sam was tinkering with drones and sensors, imagining how they might replace the helicopter or the extra hired hand. Cattle drives and moving the herd planted the question he couldn’t shake: if a drone can fly a perfect route over a field, why can’t it move cattle as well as a bike or chopper? And if it could, how many hours could he give back to his dad, and how many accidents could he prevent—by getting the old man home before sunset?
That question turned into GrazeMate. Sam’s core idea is deceptively simple, treating the movement of livestock like a repeatable industrial process instead of a heroic, one‑off event. Instead of ringing people, lining up bikes, or booking a helicopter weeks ahead, GrazeMate puts a virtual “herding button” in the producer’s pocket. Open an app, select the field you want cleared and where you want the cattle to go, and send the drone. The aircraft flies a pre‑planned route around the herd, uses onboard intelligence to read animal movement, and gradually applies just enough pressure to push cattle toward the gate. When the system detects that the mob is through (numbers counted) and the field is clear, the drone returns and the producer gets a notification on the phone, no dust, no saddle, no rotor wash, and, just as important, no overtime.
By 2025, Sam had taken the step most tinkerers never do: he formalised GrazeMate as a company and moved from being a farm kid with a good idea to a teenager with a payroll and customers. That shift from project to business is where the real story begins. It meant putting structure around a solution that had worked at home and proving it could hold up across very different landscapes and management styles. Less than a year later, GrazeMate had commitments to be on 1.7 million acres of country across Queensland and New South Wales, with the company already laying the groundwork to expand into California, another huge livestock region shaped by labor shortages, tough terrain, and rising cost pressure.
What GrazeMate is building is more than a remote‑control mustering tool; it’s a decision platform riding on top of autonomy. Every flight generates data, including animal positions, movement patterns, how different mobs respond to pressure, and even basic indicators of pasture condition and water points. Over time, that information can be used to answer questions producers wrestle with every season. Are we overusing certain fields while others sit under‑grazed? Which routes cause the least stress on cattle and the least damage to soils? How does the time of day or temperature change how quickly we can move a mob? The same system that moves cattle can quietly log the answers while it works.
For producers, the first benefit is obvious: labor and safety! Traditional herding is labor‑intensive and inherently risky. Horses go lame, bikes roll, and pilots make judgment calls in bad weather. Insurance costs and safety compliance keep rising, and it’s harder every year to find young people willing to take those risks for seasonal pay. A drone doesn’t get tired, doesn’t argue over hours, and doesn’t call in sick. That doesn’t eliminate the need for good stockmen—there will always be cattle and country that demand human presence—but it can shift human energy to the parts of the job where judgment, not horsepower, is the limiting factor.
The second benefit is time. Every hour not spent chasing scattered cattle is an hour that can be spent on the books, checking water, fixing fences, meeting with the bank, or, in Sam’s case, eating dinner with family before the sun goes down. Across a large operation, shaving one or two hours off each major muster adds up to weeks of reclaimed time each year. That’s a competitive advantage for any operator trying to grow while still keeping a hand on the wheel.
The third benefit is optionality. Once you turn herding into something you can schedule from a phone, you start to think differently about grazing management. A producer might decide to move a mob on shorter notice ahead of a forecasted heatwave, or split a herd more finely because the labor cost of doing so has dropped. In drought, the combination of aerial visibility and rapid redeployment can support more agile destocking decisions. When expansion into places like California is complete, those same tools could help operators navigate wildfire threats, grazing permits, and changing environmental rules with more precision and less guesswork.
Here are a few lessons we might take away from Sam’s experience, in hopes of creating our own on-farm technology:
Watch the “Painful Routines” on Your Operation: Sam didn’t start with abstract technology; he started with an everyday bottleneck he saw from the back of a bike, too many hours, too much risk, not enough data. Many of the best businesses in agriculture are born the same way: a farmer or rancher gets sick of a recurring problem and decides to fix it once and for all. The trick is documenting that pain well enough that other operators can see themselves in the solution.
Shift From Tinkerer to CEO: Formalizing GrazeMate in 2025 meant legal structure, contracts, support, pricing models, and all the unglamorous blocking and tackling of a real business. There is a message here for those who are sitting on “shop inventions” or home‑built systems, until someone writes an invoice and signs a service agreement, you don’t have a company, you have a clever tool.
Autonomy and Data Tend to Travel Together: Once you automate a task, you’re automatically in the data business whether you want to be or not. If GrazeMate handles mustering for 1.7 million acres across two Australian states and then moves into California, it will eventually hold one of the richest troves of real‑world livestock‑movement data on earth. That dataset may end up being at least as valuable as the mustering service itself, enabling everything from better grazing algorithms to new insurance products. The same pattern is showing up in autonomous tractors, robotic milkers, and bin‑site monitoring.
Sam’s story is a reminder that generational transition in agriculture doesn’t always mean selling out to a corporate buyer or handing the keys to the oldest child. Sometimes it means giving more power to a kid who has fresh ideas, maybe they understand code and robotics, and are eager to build an adjacent enterprise that helps keep the core operation viable. Sam Rogers didn’t walk away from agriculture when he became a CEO; he built a company aimed squarely at the problem that kept his dad out on the range after dark. That might be one of the most encouraging patterns in agriculture today: the next generation doesn’t have to choose between tech and the family place; they can do both, and, if they get it right, bring everyone home a little earlier. Thinking differently is the key! Learn more about GrazeMate HERE. (Source: Forbes)
