Monitoring for Owners Who Are Not on the Property
Plenty of good country in NSW is owned by people who do not live on it. Lifestyle blocks bought for weekends, bush blocks held for the future, hunting blocks visited a few times a year, farms run from a job in town. The land still carries a pest-control responsibility, and feral animals do not wait for you to visit. Pigs root up a paddock, foxes work the lambing country next door, deer move in through a back boundary, and by the time you get out to the block, the damage is done and you have no record of how it built up.
Absentee-Owner Monitoring solves the core problem: you cannot manage what you cannot see, and you are not there to see it. We put eyes on your block year-round with the same technology we use for full control programs (trail cameras, AI detection, and thermal drone surveys) and turn what they capture into plain written reports sent straight to you. You stay across your country’s pest situation without having to be on it.
This is pure monitoring, assessment, and reporting. There is no control work bundled into the retainer, and no equipment for you to buy, learn, or maintain. When the monitoring shows something that needs acting on, that is a decision you make with the data in front of you, not a surprise you discover months later.
What the Monitoring Covers
Trail cameras with AI detection across the block. We place cameras at the choke points where feral animals actually travel: creek crossings, fence gaps, gates, dam edges, and established pads. Where your block has mobile coverage, we use 4G cellular cameras that send images to the cloud in real time, so activity is captured without anyone visiting each camera. In areas without coverage, we run offline cameras on a scheduled retrieval cycle. AI species-identification software then processes the images, filtering out the empty false triggers and classifying the animals in the rest, so what you get back is structured data on which species, how many, and when, not a card full of unsorted photos.
Periodic thermal drone surveys. Cameras tell you what walks past a fixed point. A thermal drone survey tells you what is spread across the whole block. Flown at dawn, dusk, or night when the contrast between a warm animal and cool ground is greatest, a single flight covers hundreds of acres and reveals mobs of pigs on a creek flat or deer in timber that ground-level checks would never find. Running a survey periodically against the camera data gives you a real read on total numbers and where they are concentrated, not just a tally of who crossed a camera.
Scheduled written reports with a pest-pressure readout. On your chosen schedule, quarterly or on demand, you receive a written report that pulls the cameras and the drone survey together into a plain-English picture: species present, rough numbers, where they are concentrated, and whether pressure is rising or falling since last time. It includes photo and thermal evidence and a clear recommendation on whether anything needs acting on. It is designed to be read in a few minutes by someone who is not on the property and does not want to interpret raw data.
Spike alerts between reports. Feral animal pressure is not steady. A mob of pigs can arrive on a back boundary in a week. When the monitoring picks up a sharp rise in activity between your scheduled reports, we send an alert rather than sitting on it, so you can decide whether to bring a control program forward.
Why Monitoring Matters for an Absentee Owner
You get a record without having to keep one. Under the NSW general biosecurity duty, every landholder is expected to take reasonable steps to manage pest animals, and to be able to show it. For an owner who is rarely on the property, keeping that record is the hard part. Your monitoring reports are a timestamped, documented history of what is on your block and what is being done about it, produced for you by a licensed operator. That is exactly the kind of evidence the biosecurity duty expects you to hold, and it accumulates in the background whether you visit or not.
You are not the weak link on the boundary. Feral animals cross fences, so a block that is left unmanaged becomes a harbour that reinvades the neighbours, and the unmanaged absentee block is a well-known source of friction in rural districts. Monitoring means you know what your block is contributing to the wider problem, and can act before a neighbour has to raise it. Where the answer is coordinated control, our reporting plugs straight into the district’s coordinated neighbour programmes rather than working against them.
You act on evidence, not on a hunch or a panic. Without monitoring, an absentee owner is choosing between doing nothing and paying for a full control operation blind. With it, you spend on control when and where the data says it is warranted, and you have a baseline to measure any control work against afterwards.
It scales up cleanly when you need it to. Monitoring is the light-touch layer. When a report shows pressure that genuinely needs acting on, the same data feeds directly into a full property assessment and an integrated control program, so there is no starting from scratch. For owners whose block sits under a stewardship or conservation agreement, or who want a scheduled year-round program rather than watch-and-decide, our Annual Stewardship and Compliance Program builds the control and the annual reporting into one managed service.
Where We Provide Monitoring
- Hunter Valley: Lifestyle and hobby blocks, vineyards, and part-time holdings dealing with pigs, foxes, and deer
- Northern Tablelands: Grazing and bush blocks watching wild dog, fox, and pig pressure along the timber edge
- North West NSW: Larger absentee holdings needing periodic eyes on pig and goat activity
- Central West NSW: Mixed and lifestyle country tracking fox, pig, and rabbit numbers
- North Coast NSW: Hinterland and rural-residential blocks monitoring deer and pigs in timbered country
We travel to your property to deploy and service the monitoring, and you do not need to arrange anything beyond property access.
Pricing
Absentee-Owner Monitoring is built from our published technology add-ons, trail camera deployment (from $150 per camera per month) and periodic thermal drone surveys (from $300 to $500 per survey), rolled into a single annual retainer with scheduled written reports. Because block size, terrain, camera coverage, and how often you want eyes on the property all differ, every retainer is quoted to your situation, and you pay one predictable annual figure rather than arranging work visit by visit. See our full pricing for the underlying rates.
Own a block you cannot always get to? Contact Feral Up to set up monitoring. We will put eyes on your country, send you clear reports, and make sure you always know what is happening on your block, even when you are not there.