What is HerdInsights?
HerdInsights is a cloud-based “smart collar” for dairy cows that improves heat detection in cows and reduces healthcare costs through early illness detection. The smart collar detects oestrus (heat) in cows by monitoring the cows’ activity such as mounting and chin resting behaviours, and also monitors cow health status by recording rumination, feeding and lying behaviour.
How does the product help improve farm efficiency?
Delays in heat detection or detecting health issues such as heat stress, lameness and mastitis result in loss of milk quality and volumes. Reported heat detection rates are about 50% to 60% depending on what country you are in. HerdInsights helps farmers to get healthier cows pregnant quicker in a more cost-efficient manner. Typically, HerdInsights helps farmers achieve three-week submission rates of 90% to 95% and six-week submission rates of 95% to 100%.
How have you developed the technology for different markets?
We purposely cut our cloth and fine-tuned our solution in Ireland as heat/illness detection is a lot harder in the pasture system than in a confined system because you’ve got so many variables such as weather, distance and climate. We knew if we could crack the technology on the pasture system we could take it all over the world.
What export markets are you targeting to grow the business?
We currently sell our solution in over 10 countries including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and South America. We’re also moving into large indoor herds in the US. We’ve white-labelled our smart collars for Waikato, the New Zealand milking parlour manufacturer, which has operations all over the world. Our biggest growth to date outside of Ireland has been in Australia and the US.
Do you see significant opportunity in the US?
The scale of the US is just huge. I’ve been in the US for the last month and we’ve sold more collars over there in that time than we have in Ireland and the UK in the last 12 months owing to herd sizes. Right now, we’ve about 40,000 collars in the pipeline in the US and that’s on less than 10 farms. Because our solution is cloud-based, it means we can scale it to meet the needs of larger herds in the US or South America.
What part of the US are you targeting?
Through our partnership with Waikato, we are selling collars all over the US in places like Oregon, Washington, Texas and the midwest, but our focus would be on the larger southern herds down in states like Colorado, Kansas and Texas. We’ve just installed four systems in Nebraska and Minnesota in the last week and the plan is to expand in these areas by the end of the year.
HerdInsights will be competing in the 2018 Innovation Arena at the National Ploughing Championships. The company will also be located at the Collins Agri tent at block 1, row 5, stand 124.
What is HerdInsights?
HerdInsights is a cloud-based “smart collar” for dairy cows that improves heat detection in cows and reduces healthcare costs through early illness detection. The smart collar detects oestrus (heat) in cows by monitoring the cows’ activity such as mounting and chin resting behaviours, and also monitors cow health status by recording rumination, feeding and lying behaviour.
How does the product help improve farm efficiency?
Delays in heat detection or detecting health issues such as heat stress, lameness and mastitis result in loss of milk quality and volumes. Reported heat detection rates are about 50% to 60% depending on what country you are in. HerdInsights helps farmers to get healthier cows pregnant quicker in a more cost-efficient manner. Typically, HerdInsights helps farmers achieve three-week submission rates of 90% to 95% and six-week submission rates of 95% to 100%.
How have you developed the technology for different markets?
We purposely cut our cloth and fine-tuned our solution in Ireland as heat/illness detection is a lot harder in the pasture system than in a confined system because you’ve got so many variables such as weather, distance and climate. We knew if we could crack the technology on the pasture system we could take it all over the world.
What export markets are you targeting to grow the business?
We currently sell our solution in over 10 countries including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and South America. We’re also moving into large indoor herds in the US. We’ve white-labelled our smart collars for Waikato, the New Zealand milking parlour manufacturer, which has operations all over the world. Our biggest growth to date outside of Ireland has been in Australia and the US.
Do you see significant opportunity in the US?
The scale of the US is just huge. I’ve been in the US for the last month and we’ve sold more collars over there in that time than we have in Ireland and the UK in the last 12 months owing to herd sizes. Right now, we’ve about 40,000 collars in the pipeline in the US and that’s on less than 10 farms. Because our solution is cloud-based, it means we can scale it to meet the needs of larger herds in the US or South America.
What part of the US are you targeting?
Through our partnership with Waikato, we are selling collars all over the US in places like Oregon, Washington, Texas and the midwest, but our focus would be on the larger southern herds down in states like Colorado, Kansas and Texas. We’ve just installed four systems in Nebraska and Minnesota in the last week and the plan is to expand in these areas by the end of the year.
HerdInsights will be competing in the 2018 Innovation Arena at the National Ploughing Championships. The company will also be located at the Collins Agri tent at block 1, row 5, stand 124. 
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