Richard Hobson set out to build an inexpensive tag to monitor the key performance indicators of farm animals, for the one billion people, who rely on livestock, for their livelihood around the world.
In 2015, Hobson travelled from Dublin to Eagle Labs in Cambridge to access funds and developed an initial prototype. Here he tells the story behind his ‘Fitbit for farm animals’ vision and the groundwork in opening up new global markets for tagging and tracking, from cashmere goats in China to wild stock conservation of rhino and buffalo in South Africa.
How are you different for the other monitors on the market?
We offer a smart device that helps you to monitor farm profitability, and because of its intelligent design, we don’t need to charge the earth for it. It’s also the world’s first tag that can be used on any animal, making it both flexible and cost-effective. Herdsy’s primary target market is the (non-dairy) dry stock farm which is most in need of affordable digitisation, as current ag-tech is proving too expensive and too complicated for the needs of these farmers.
Herdsy is a unique technology as it only requires a small number of tags (from two to four tags, depending on herd size) to extrapolate the health of an entire herd, radically cutting down the cost of ag-tech, which means that it’s 95% as good as tagging every animal but 98% cheaper. The first Herdsy collar combines a mix of smart sensors featuring GPS, a 3D-accelerometer, temperature sensors, barometric pressure, heart and pulse monitors and body mass measures.
We aim to help the farmer optimise profitability by using our technology to monitor his herd or flock continuously and provide alerts and updates on lameness, weight gain, location mapping and even informing the farmer if a dog is chasing his sheep.
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