The IoT startup mindset behind big-data cattle farming

At 36, Brian Walsh looks cool, but compared with what he does, his appearance really is nothing special. As CEO and co-founder of Vital Herd, Inc., Walsh is using IoT technology to track every cow's physical condition and movements around the clock, and thereby help farmers improve the quality and yield of milk and beef. At PTC's global user conference in Boston, I interviewed the entrepreneur who pioneered this unusual business.

"At present, people judge the health and nutritional management of most livestock through daily visual observation and experience. This is a highly inefficient method, because when a problem is discovered, it is very difficult to correct and costly." Walsh said.
 

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Vital Herd's approach is to have the cow swallow an approximately 4.5-inch "electronic pill" (ePill) that integrates various sensors, chips, and communication systems. After the "electronic pill" enters the cow's "rumen" (the first and largest of the four stomachs of ruminants, whose main role is to temporarily store feed and carry out microbial fermentation), it stays there and from then on begins continuously tracking various life signals of the cow, including heart rate, body temperature, rumination time, gastric acid concentration, hormone secretion, and more.

These life signals are transmitted by microwave to a nearby information receiver and sent to a cloud platform for data analysis and processing. According to certain standards, people can check the cow's vital signs and dynamics anytime and anywhere through terminal devices, and the system will issue an alarm if any tracked cow shows an abnormality. On the basis of big data analysis, people can even predict the cow's behavioral patterns, and farmers can therefore improve feeding, prevent disease, and improve management.

Vital Herd's first product currently under development is aimed at dairy producers, and by tracking dairy cows it will ultimately help producers improve milk quality and yield. "We expect to complete the final stage of testing in the second half of this year and put it into commercial operation before the end of the year. Next year our business in the dairy industry will be fully rolled out," Walsh revealed. Since the company was founded in April 2012, Vital Herd has raised about $1.3 million in angel investment. "Our previous survey of thousands of dairy producers showed that more than 90% of respondents were very interested in our service."

If business development goes as Walsh hopes, Vital Herd will enter a vast market with broad prospects. According to statistics in a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly four million animals in the United States die each year during milk and meat production, while an even greater number of animals become ill. This means that U.S. dairy and meat producers suffer billions of dollars in economic losses every year, including lost income, extremely high treatment costs, and feeding costs - and these billions of dollars in losses are precisely Vital Herd's room for growth.

"We will be the world's first software service company to truly begin large-scale data monitoring of cattle. Unlike previous research institutions that attempted this field, we can keep costs very low, even reaching 1/20 of previous levels," Walsh said. "For dairy producers, they only need to pay a service subscription fee of a few dozen dollars per tracked dairy cow per year."

Walsh's highly pioneering business story not only brought a lot of enjoyment to the audience, including me, but also prompted a few thoughts of mine about IoT entrepreneurship.

First, the IoT era may offer entrepreneurs the possibility of creating unprecedented product innovations, and the basic feature of these products is that they combine sensors and chips. Undoubtedly, Vital Herd's core - the "electronic pill" - is a pioneering product. The inventor of this technology is Walsh's partner; it was once used by the U.S. military and was later spun off because of a lack of investment in the project, which is how Vital Herd came to be.

"In the future, every object may have an integrated chip, whether it is a home appliance, a large excavator, or even a light bulb," said Eric Snow, PTC's vice president of global communications. "This change will completely transform product design and the concepts and methods of innovation, thus bringing many opportunities to new entrants."

Second, IoT entrepreneurship is no longer an independent act. Compared with entrepreneurship in traditional fields, it requires combining and utilizing more ecosystem resources and adopting more open innovation. Taking Vital Herd as an example, the "electronic pill" that integrates sensing technology and communication technology is its core patent, but for big-data cattle farming to truly help dairy producers, relying only on the "electronic pill" is clearly not enough - this will be a massive project, including software, communications, cloud platforms, and data analysis.

"What we are best at is the electronic pill. For a startup, we are very flexible and fast, but we lack resources, so we must focus and cannot cover everything. For the other aspects of the business, we have adopted cooperation and the use of existing platforms." Walsh explained. Precisely because of this, Vital Herd, which has already been founded for more than 2 years, is still a "light company." Apart from the two founding team members, its more than 10 other members are a temporary externally hired expert team assembled according to project needs, spanning fields such as software, communications, and livestock farming.