AgTech

Labby wants to make milk healthier and cows happier with better sensors • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in AgTech, Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Hardware, LabbyNo Comments

For most dairy farmers, milk flowing from their cows is tested by a traveling technician once per month. But in a world where bovine mastitis can appear from one day to the next, it is udderly ridiculous to test milk flowing from cows once per month. Today at ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield, Labby offered a different solution, with an inline optical sensor that can test cows every time they are milked. For now, the product detects potential issues early, but over time, the company believes it can start predicting issues before they occur. The company’s product is called MilKey and comes in two variants: a hand-held product that can be used anywhere, or an inline product that can be hooked into the milking machines, which enables daily farmers to test continuously. The main difference between the two products is also their strengths. The handheld device can be used by any technician out in the (literal) field; you select the cow you’re testing on a smartphone app, and the test results show up with the right animal. That’s great when a cow is wandering about or if you have suspicions about a particular animal having an illness. The inline device is fully automatic and works over Wi-Fi. For this device, the results need to be assigned to the right cow manually, but it makes it feasible to test every cow, every milking. Labby’s portable sensor. Image Credits: Labby. Labby tells ZebethMedia that the device takes spectral measurements of milk samples and uploads them to the cloud. From there, the company uses machine-learning models to take spectral readings as inputs. It can estimate the content of the milk, broken down into fats, proteins and somatic cell counts. Once the measurements are taken and assigned to an animal, the farmers can use an app or any web browser to see the full testing history of any animal, to ensure they are going a-bovine and beyond in terms of milk production. “Animal health records are like human records; they give critical indications about animal health and feed efficiency. It turns out that milk is the best biomarker for everything. Currently, the industry only tests once a month for each animal. We think this is a systemic failure for the farmers and for the animals,” says Julia Somerdin, CEO and founder of Labby, in an interview with ZebethMedia. “One complication for animal health is mastitis. It one of the most common yet expensive diseases, and it can change from day to day. So when they do 30-day testing, the test will tell you everything is fine, but the next day the animal could develop a case, which can be subclinical with no symptoms. So for farmers, between testing days, they have no idea how the animal is doing.” You may be wondering “who cares,” but dairy farming is a hell of an industry. There are 9 million cows across 40,000 farms in the U.S. Worldwide, there are 250 million cows across 115 million farms; it all adds up. Labby’s dashboard gives you unherd-of amounts of details, both for spot testing and trends for each animal in the herd. Image Credits: Labby. “With our solution, we can provide on-farm real-time testing to help provide the farmer with daily, weekly and monthly health records,” says Somerdin. “Animal health is the critical indicator that’s missing from today’s industry practices.” From the numbers and the impact, you’ll be unsurprised that there are big sums of money involved. The best milk gets farmers the best price, which means that milk quality is directly linked to revenue, the Labby team tells me. The benefit is two-fold: Healthier cows need less veterinary attention, and higher-quality milk nets the milk producers more money per gallon of milk delivered. “We can insert Labby in the value chain. Dairy is a very input-intensive industry so we have all kinds of suppliers that help farmers produce more and better milk, and then the dairy farmers sell their milk to dairy processors. With our service, the big battle, besides the money-saving aspect, is we create all this real-time data,” says Somerdin. “Animal genetics companies can use that data, helping them refine their algorithms. We can also bridge the gap between dairy producers and veterinarians, enabling telehealth for cows.” Labby’s inline milk analyzing sensor, MilKey. Image Credits: Labby. Apart from the fact that when I hear “telehealth for cows,” I giggle at the thought of a cow staring into a Zoom screen and talking about its feelings and its four upset stomachs, it’s easy to understand how Labby adds significant value and the ability to be an early warning system for animal health. “The most important thing is that you don’t need a technician to sample the milk anymore. The cleaning can also be integrated with the current system,” says Somerdin, explaining how the company has designed a set-it-and-forget-it approach to continuous testing. Labby was part of Techstars, and raised a total of $1.3 million from them and a number of other investors, including MIT Media lab’s E14 fund. The company officially started selling its products in early October, and has only just started shipping its products to customers. In the short term, it’s a hardware+SaaS business, but after that, it’s time to start milking the data itself for wisdom. “Our business model has three revenue streams. For the dairy farmers, they pay once for the hardware equipment, then monthly for us to provide the testing in the cloud. The farmer pays per cow per day,” says Somerdin. “In addition, we’re looking at data. We believe we are generating significant value for the industry, such as for genetic companies. We will have a data licensing fee, but we will wait to offer that until we have half a million cows on the platform.” Over time, the company hopes to be able to use big data to catch a glimpse of the future, too. “The data will help us develop a reliable benchmark for each animal,” says Somerdin, and suggests that deviations from

AgriWebb’s software seeks to boost yields, lower environmental impacts for farmers and ranchers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 10, 2022Posted in agriwebb, AgTech, Climate, Startups, sustainable foodNo Comments

AgriWebb is on a mission to help livestock producers feed the world efficiently, profitably and sustainably by providing its comprehensive, ground-truth database for beef production worldwide. The Australian startup, which builds a livestock management platform for ranchers and farmers, wants to digitize farm records and the meat production process from the cow to the consumer and drive the industry’s animal and environmental welfare transparency. The startup said today it has raised another $6.8 million of funding led by Germin8 Ventures and iSelect Fund. In total, AgriWebb has raised $27 million in Series B and about $29.3 million since its inception in 2014. It did not disclose its valuation when asked. Its app allows users to visualize their operations and give insights on animals and grazing, including the best grass location and which animals gain weight. On top of that, it lets ranchers improve their sustainable land management for better profits and leverage the on-farm data they’re recording to make more intelligent business decisions, according to the company. AgriWebb claims more than 16,000 farmers and ranchers globally are using its cloud-based platform and managing approximately 19 million animals on over 136 million acres of grazing land across the globe, including Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. The global beef market is estimated at $500 billion, but the pure farm management software market in its core geographies is estimated at around $3.5 billion, the company executive chairman Justin Webb told ZebethMedia. AgriWebb’s key markets include Australia — where more than 15% of the national herd is managed using its platform — the U.K. and the U.S. Additionally, AgriWebb has partnerships in Brazil and South Africa, Webb said. Unlike most competitors who act as a point solution focused on one or two areas of farm management, AgriWebb’s platform brings together animal management, grazing management and team communication; task and compliance management; and daily record-keeping in one place, Webb explained. “Its grazing insights enable ranchers to maximize productivity, eliminate waste, and validate grazing and animal management decisions in a way that other record-keeping systems can’t touch,” Webb pointed out. Webb founded AgriWebb with John Fargher (chief revenue officer) and Kevin Baum (chief executive officer) in 2014. In Australia, the three founders discovered that farmers were not only interested in the advantages of technology but were also desperately cobbling their own solutions with scrappy spreadsheets and notebooks. “Livestock producers deserve better technology to help them maximize their business and consumers need more reliable provenance for the animal and environmental welfare of their food,” Webb said. “AgriWebb has always been about serving the farmers, and this round of funding doesn’t change our mission; it simply magnifies it.” The latest funding will be used for the international expansion of AgriWebb to ranchers and farmers in the U.S., the U.K., and Latin America, both directly and via partnerships. AgriWebb has secured customers in 28 of the 50 states since its U.S. launch in 2021 and plans to continue rapidly expanding. In addition, the latest funding will enable the company to establish its database. Apart from the funding, AgriWebb recently joined two project proposals to the USDA CSC program, one led by American Farmland Trust and the other by Farm Journal’s Trust in Food initiative, Webb said. Both aim to improve the U.S. beef supply chain’s climate footprint and scale regenerative agriculture practices, Webb continued. One project is focused on improving transparency in the beef supply chain and understanding the GHG impact of different practices; the second aims to scale the adoption of practices through payments for practice changes. “There’s a misconception that agriculture is at odds with climate, but the importance of sustainability and implementing sustainable practices is far from lost on farmers and producers,” Webb said. “In fact, the long-term sustainability and viability of their land are of utmost importance. Talk to any landholder and you’ll understand their long-term goal is to pass on their land in better condition to the next generation. Sustainable and regenerative practices can and do exist in tandem with productive and profitable farms, and we remain steadfast in our endeavor to support producers now and in the future through data that measures, manages and improves the sustainability of the food supply chain from farm to plate.” The company raised its first Series B from investors, including Telus Ventures, Grosvenor Food & AgTech and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation in January 2021. “AgriWebb fits with Germin8’s thesis to invest in the full-stack enterprise software companies within AgTech that bring essential enterprise value to farmers in alignment with practices that are sustainable,” said managing partner at Germin8 Ventures Michael Lavin. “There are very few software offerings capable of accelerating the regenerative agriculture practices our climate stands to benefit from, and even fewer that target livestock production rather than being at odds with it.”