When fire jumped the boundary at Attica Station two years ago, station manager Brandon Hood-Smith reached for his phone to check on the cattle.
"I got on the app with the Ceres Tag data and saw that there was a cow and calf up in the back corner," Mr Hood-Smith said. "So when the fire was coming through, I went up there and I found them, and I walked them back down while everyone else was on the grader getting fire breaks in. I was able to walk the last couple of head out."
The pair, including a week-old calf, were in the path of a blaze that ultimately burned through 5000 acres of the property after a neighbouring fire crossed a containment break. Mr Hood-Smith said the tag on the calf's mother was the only reason he knew to look.
"Without the Ceres Tag, I wouldn't have even known they were up in there," he said.
Attica Station, located in central Queensland, is a heavily timbered station and runs about 1,000 head of cattle. Mr Hood-Smith has used CERES TAG devices on the property for close to three years, with roughly 10% of the herd currently tagged.
The original problem was straightforward: with that much tree cover, Mr Hood-Smith could not see how cattle were actually using each paddock.
"I wasn't 100% certain what parts of the paddocks they were using, so it was sort of a bit of a put the tags on, see what points of the paddock they were using, what they weren't, work out what would be the best way to potentially make them go out to certain areas of paddocks and make sure they're utilising the whole paddock," he said.
That data now shapes his rotation decisions directly. In one 1,000-hectare paddock, Mr Hood-Smith found the herd was only using about 100 hectares of it.
The information has also changed how mustering is planned.
"It's really helped with lowering helicopter hours, because he's not thoroughly searching through all this country that there hasn't been anything in," he said of the property's helicopter musterer.
The same visibility helped Mr Hood-Smith fix a paddock cattle were avoiding altogether. With fire season approaching and boundary grass needing to stay low, he used the tag data to identify an unused back corner, found a water point to draw cattle into it, and is now seeing it grazed.
Beyond location, Mr Hood-Smith uses the tags' grazing, resting and rumination data to judge when a mob has got the best out of a paddock before shifting them on, typically in mobs of 250.
"If they're not walking very far, they're grazing for a long period of time, and then they're resting for a long period of time, it tells me that they've gone out, got a good feed, they've come back in, they're ruminating at the water point, they're having a drink, they're settled, they're happy," he said. "If they're walking a lot and not grazing for a long period, they're coming back in, they're not really resting and ruminating, so they're usually burning kilos off, walking just to try and find feed."
Data updates every six hours has helped Mr Hood-Smith to learn the herd's routine well enough to plan musters around it.
"There's no point going out mustering after 2pm, because the cattle are wanting to leave the water, and it's a lot harder to get them to stay, turn in and go back to a water point," he said.
That pattern has cut the labour needed to prepare a muster. Mr Hood-Smith, who often works the cattle alone, can draw a portion of the mob into a holding paddock himself before the helicopter arrives.
"I can go out here at 12 o'clock, put a few head into a water point and shut the gates, and then I can put them into a holding paddock. I can know that I've got 200 head here ready to go for mustering, and then the helicopter's only looking for 50 rather than 250," he said.
Of the 10% of the herd fitted with the CERES TAGs, he's made sure to include some of the station's repeat offenders, who consistently avoid helicopter mustering.
It's working well, with cattle no longer getting left behind on mustering days.
Mr Hood-Smith said he was initially sceptical about satellite connectivity holding up under Attica's tree cover, but the tags have proven durable. Only two have come off in three years, and both were recovered using the tag's last known location.
The satellite connection also removed the need for any on-property infrastructure, a point Mr Hood-Smith said made the tags an easier sell to management, given the cost of building tracks up the property's steep, rugged country to install towers.
Attica is now extending the technology to its bulls this year, aiming to confirm they are working the paddocks rather than camped at water.
"We're going to put tags on our bulls this year just to see how they go and track that they're actually not just sitting at a water point and doing nothing," Mr Hood-Smith said.
Bulls represent a serious outlay for the operation, he added, and losing track of one at Attica can be a needle in a haystack scenario.
For a business managing 60,000 acres with limited labour, Mr Hood-Smith said the tags have become less a monitoring tool and more a daily decision-making aid, from rotation timing to fire season preparedness.
"I like to have a bit of data on things," he said. "When you've got something to measure, you can manage it."
Visit the Ceres Tag website for more information.