Optimising the feeding regime of livestock on pasture is an important topic and can be facilitated through the development of Precision Grazing Management tools. The focus lies on optimising yield and quality of pasture feed in return of saving costs on supplementary feed and labor. An established method to measure available feed on milking platforms is a georeferenced rising plate meter (RPM) that requires weekly farm walks across all paddocks. A new alternative is weekly grassland assessment with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). They require an operator to program a flight grid and to analyse captured images downstream. This study modelled labor time requirements during the work operations on field of both methods. Therefore, a farm with a compact milking platform was simulated and compared to a farm with a milking platform consisting of three separate areas. Additionally, a grazing system with low and with high stocking density, meaning large versus small paddocks, was compared. The UAV method showed a lower labor input on field in all scenarios in the range of 15 to 80 minutes per measurement event compared to the RPM because preparation tasks needed to be performed only once before the flight mission. Contrarily, the RPM method demanded the operator to travel far distances across the paddocks and time for preparation before each new paddock, making it more suitable for grazing systems with few paddocks.
