The U.S. cattle herd has been shrinking for years, sitting at 86.2 million head as of early 2026, a 75-year low, while beef prices have climbed to record highs. For ranchers across Texas, the pressure to make every acre productive has never been greater. And the enemy stealing those acres is something most people drive right past without noticing.

It's the brush. Quietly, season after season, invasive woody species like mesquite and prickly pear reclaim land that should be feeding cattle. Texas A&M AgriLife Extension estimates brush encroachment costs Texas producers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost grazing capacity each year.

Most ranchers know the problem; many can't find a practical way to solve it. Curtis Schramm thinks he has one.

Curtis Schramm prepares his XAG P150 agricultural drone for a brush-control job. (Photo: Brandon Thomas)

When the Brush Takes Over

Schramm operates in Gonzales County, a Texas cattle region where livestock accounts for 93 percent of agricultural sales and crop rows make up just 10 percent of farmland. Here, the problem is tangible and relentless. According to Texas A&M research, a single adult mesquite tree can consume up to 20 gallons of water per day during peak growing season, and prickly pear density can increase 25 to 30 percent each year during prolonged drought. In a region that relies almost entirely on rainfall, that's a compounding loss that shrinks a rancher's usable pasture year after year.

The traditional answers work only when the economics align. In Schramm's experience, a 29-acre brushy pasture is too small for a half-million-dollar ground rig to bother with. A helicopter can cover hundreds of acres an hour but won't spray precisely over a dense thicket. And shredding with a tractor makes things worse: it stresses the plants, accelerates regrowth, and leaves fields full of stumps that prevent other equipment from entering afterward.

Prickly pear cactus is one of the common invasive brush species reducing usable pasture for Texas ranchers. (Photo: Curtis Schramm)

"A lot of my work is a fix to poor management practices from decades, even lifetimes of ranchers and landowners mismanaging property," says Schramm, owner of Texas Agridrone Services. "Letting native brush and other invasive species come in and take over."

A Different Kind of Precision

Brush work comes with a different set of demands than open-field spraying. Schramm's jobs involve dense, irregularly shaped thickets, damaged terrain, and pastures laced with electrical lines. Although agricultural spray drones are built to handle a range of priorities, he knows that penetration and precision matter most for his work. "What good would a wide swath do me if it didn't have the force to push the chemical all the way down through the canopy?" he says.

He chose the XAG P150, starting operations in August 2025. The quad-rotor design generates a strong, concentrated downdraft, and paired with the RevoSpray System, it reaches a maximum flow rate of 7.9 gallons per minute (30 liters per minute), pushing herbicide uniformly through canopy layers to the understory below. When Schramm hovers over a dense mesquite stand, landowners expect the spray to drift down gently, like rain under a tree. What they see instead surprises them every time. "When the drone goes over, the plants swirl, the ground's blowing up in the dust, and the chemical reaches every bit of the plant, not just the soil. They're always impressed."

The drone's 4D imaging radar detects obstacles between 5 and 328 feet along the flight path (1.5 to 100 meters), enabling safe operation across the uneven, obstacle-heavy terrain Schramm navigates daily. Real-time 3D terrain mapping enables autonomous flight without a preloaded map, adjusting continuously to each new field's contours. "The way it quickly adjusts... it makes me laugh every time," he says. "That's incredible to me, because I'm thinking about all that math that has to compute to know what the speed, height, and all those variables to make a decision in a millisecond."

The P150's foldable design also lets Schramm load, launch, and manage a full day's operation alone. For a small-business owner in his first years of operation, working solo means lower overhead and more profit. It's also a practical necessity: his jobs are often on properties where larger equipment simply can't reach.

The results have been clear. His first job, a shredder-damaged pasture of mixed mesquite, prickly pear, and huisache, looked one month later like a war zone. "It killed everything but the grass," Schramm says, recalling the landowner calling him out to come see it.

Top: dense huisache and mesquite canopy before treatment. Bottom: the same pasture after drone herbicide application, showing effective canopy penetration and brush control to restore usable grazing land. (Photo: Curtis Schramm)

In his first season, August through December 2025, he completed 682 acres of brushwork without losing a single client. For each of those ranchers, recovered pasture means more grass, more cattle weight, and more income — a chain of returns that begins with getting the brush out.

Land, Cattle, and Family

Schramm didn't arrive here through a straight line. He spent decades connected to the land, first through his family's poultry operation for Tyson Foods from 1977 to 2015, and before that through his grandfather, a county conservation resource manager for 31 years who taught young Curtis to identify grasses, understand invasive plants, and know when and how to treat them. "All those techniques I grew up learning turned out to be something I needed when I was in my late 40s and early 50s," he laughs. "Here I am doing this."

For Schramm, the work has always been about more than brush. "If you're in a drought, you need to feed your cattle as cheaply as possible," he says. "The quicker you can put weight on, the more money you can make." He's brought his refill cycle down to under 32 seconds: batteries swapped, tank refilled, drone back in the air in under a minute, because every minute on the ground is a minute not serving that chain. "The idea is to feed your land to feed your cattle to feed your family."

Curtis Schramm working solo in the field. (Photo: Brandon Thomas)

"It's my life now," he says. "When I wake up at 4 in the morning to go somewhere and do something with the drone, I'm super excited. It's been something that's filled my life, and for my family, very well."