Terry Canning grew up on a small milk farm in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and was aware that milk cows were of crucial importance for his upbringing – but they shouldn’t be his future.
Instead, Canning was “shipped to the academy,” he says Assets, Where he studied engineering for four years. After the end he worked for a number of computer companies. In 2004, Canning decided in 2004 to return to his family house and found its own company – a software product for the management of lips.
At that time, the idea of animal analysis was of great importance in agricultural industry, since the recent outbreaks of foot-mouth-mouth diseases emphasize the risks not to keep any records of animal movements.
In order to solve this problem, the initial idea was to attach devices to animals – as Canning describes it, a kind of “Fitbit For cows ”, but that turned out to be expensive and difficult. The batteries would go out or earphones could be caught and removed if a cow moved through a farm.
Canning thought there had to be a different way – and he found it with the help of his co -founder Adam Askew. Askew was a researcher who dealt with computer vision for medical purposes such as cancer detection. Together they had a Eureka moment: Why couldn’t they use the same technology to see cows? They developed a system that they could observe when the cattle drove under a camera, analyzing how healthy cows are and in particular whether it was limp.
“We deal with the lameness problem, which is a major problem with many, many dairies,” says Canning. “They assume that 30% of all cows do not go as well as they should.” This has an effect on economic effects because immovable cows are switched off: Cannenic points on British data, which indicates that the lameness of cattle leads to 142 million GBP (190 million US dollars). And there is also an environmental impact: shortening of the milk producing years from cows means that more animals are needed, which makes the industry resource and greenhouse gas emitting.
The company has become a cattle, and its core technology has not changed too much since its foundation in 2019. A KI eye – a simple camera – sits a farm every day over the route milk cows. While each cow comes by under its visual circumference, it is identified and evaluated on the basis of its unique markings how well. The camera identifies around 16 points for each animal, such as the ear, the back of the head and the spine, and then uses the shift of these data points to analyze the course of the cow. The AI of Cattleye consists of advanced Deep Learning models that have been trained on data generated by veterinarians. The company has a wealth of around 100,000 videos of cows, which were commented on and evaluated by veterinarians for observed health and are used for training the models.
If the system is used, the AI each cow gives a score between 0 and 100: every cow that is achieved with over 50 is regarded as lame and an investigation by the farmer is worthy that accesses the data to its flock via a web app. Cattleye can identify four weeks earlier than most people, according to Canning, thanks to its machine learning analysis.
Cattleye usually costs farmers about $ 1.45 per cow and month, but can “deliver at least a 10 -fold return,” says Canning. It also strikes lameness by around 10 percentage points and reduces emission intensity by up to 40%by increasing the lifespan of the cows. Science behind Cattleye was also evaluated by Independent scientific studiesWhich came to similar conclusions.
The furnishing costs are kept low by using products from the hand so as not to deter farmers with high requirements. The AI system is a patented and complicated process, but the affected hardware consists of a simple, mass-produced camera that contains at least four meters above the floor on which the cows go, as well as an Ethernet switch and an SD card. And since it cannot trust the cows of the queue, the system also works if several animals run under the camera at the same time.
With the kind permission of Cattleeye
One of the earliest commercial customers of Cattleye was the British supermarket chain Tesco. Tom Atkins, head of agriculture at Tesco, says that the company has been working with Cattleye since 2019. “It is an essential part of our customers who buy our milk Assets.
The early, enthusiastic introduction of Cattleeye technology at Tesco helped the Landsaat Financing of 500,000 GBP ($ 672,900) from the Venture Capital Fund based in Belfast. (Further financing included A round of 2.5 million US dollars in 2021.) In 2020, the company started a pilot project in three dairy farms outside of Cheshire in Great Britain, where a veterinarian took part every week and evaluated the health of the cows over time, as well as the cameras. “This became our basic truth data,” says Canning.
Today Cattleye is a digital administrator for more than 200,000 cows worldwide, with the GEA group of German food technology increasing an increasing US customer trunk The company acquired in March 2024. (Canning declined to exchange financial details about the acquisition, except to say that the business in resource resource helped and contributed to “no longer worrying about cash” to expand the company.) Danoneand global milk -like Arla.
Next on the street map for Cattleye, it is to try to find other uses for the same technology. The company has already completed a pilot project with poultry to measure its well -being, but it has not been commercialized. “Much of this technology is already used in other sectors,” says Canning. “The dairy industry is not the forerunner in all of this.
Since Gea is an important data holder who focuses on the milk industry, Canning can predict a future in which the AI expertise from GEA and Cattleye could be combined to give specific advice on how and when it is best to milk a certain cow. Other insights could include if a cow calves and how well they eat. “It is great to affect a better planet, to feed more people and to give them more nutrition in a sustainable way,” says Canning.
