Monitoring cattle behavior and pasture use with GPS and GIS

Precision agriculture is already being used commercially to improve variabi lity management in row crop agriculture. In the same way, understanding how spatial and temporal variability of animal, forage, soil and landscape fea tures affect grazing behavior and forage utilization provides potential to modify pasture management, improve efficiency of utilization, and maximize profits: Recent advances in global positioning system (GPS) technology have allowed the development of lightweight GPS collar receivers suitable for m onitoring animal position at 5-min intervals. The GPS data can be imported into a geographic information system (GIS) to assess animal behavior charac teristics and pasture utilization. This paper describes application and use of GPS technology on intensively managed beef cattle, and implications for livestock behavior and management research on pasture.