Ian Wheal is founder and CEO of Breedr, which turns real-world livestock data into actionable insights, improving farmer profit and promoting sustainable meat production. Senior Farm & Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays caught up with Wheal to hear about the innovative platform.
Wheal was raised on a cow calf operation in Australia. His father spent a lot of time building co-ops and supply chains and created some of the first contracts with retailers in Australia, so networking ranchers to produce better beef supply chains was always a part of his life.
“Breedr is focused on how to bring that to individual producers,” Wheal explained. “How do we enable these supply chains to be able to vertically collaborate but still put a lot of power in the hands of ranchers so that no one gets left behind?”
The platform is composed of three major elements, which Wheal explained, “One is super easy data collection on the ranch. That is, with a phone, connecting an EID and a weigh scale and logging your births and inventory.”
Wheal said they often call themselves a succession planning tool because the new generation is reaching for apps to manage farm data, so Breedr wants to make that easy for them.
“That isn’t just about productivity on the ranch,” Wheal stated. “That data is very valuable when you’re marketing your cattle and how that goes through into a supply chain. We are trying to interlink that.”
He explained that Breedr is bonded and assists with private treaty sales into feedyards through the supply chain so we can continue tracking those cattle. Then, when they reach the packing plants, the data will flow back through the feedyard to the cow calf operation.
“When you want to make decisions on culling, you aren’t just thinking about phenotypically what it looks like, you are starting to say, ‘Did its progeny kill well? Did it feed well? How do I make better decisions on my ranch to produce a product that my customer wants?’ That is the feedyard, but in the end, it is the consumer.”
The platform is a good fit for producers who are already using EID to increase their productivity. “We have a whole team of people in America to help you on that journey, and that would include importing historic data and getting it set up for you, so we make it super simple,” Wheal assured.
Even if a producer is using more rudimentary methods to record data, Wheal recommends his podcast, The Future of Beef, as an avenue to learn about the innovations being utilized on many top ranches around the world. It also reveals the ranchers’ feelings about supply chains, animal management, genomics, genetics, feeding, and more.
“You can learn stuff there and then apply it through the app as well,” he advised.
The app is also great for feedyards looking for cattle with data showing good growth rates and feeding conversions. The Breedr team regularly works with feedyards on animal health systems, induction, sorting, and genomics sorting at the gate.
“Feedyards often have a little higher level of data, but that is the data that we need the cow calf guys to have also to make these decisions,” Wheal said, bringing the conversation full circle.
The cow calf operations that can get the most benefit from the app are processing cattle through a chute and gathering individual weaning weights on calves.
“We have 20-head ranches up to 150,000-head ranches, so it can work at any one of those levels,” Wheal detailed. “The important thing is how do you think about your change on your ranch and how do you want to move into the future? We want to take you on that journey with us, so you can learn.”
Producers using the app can expect better returns on their beef, and they don’t have to do it alone. “We also have a retained ownership fund where we can help people retain ownership on those cattle,” Wheal explained. “We work with seventy-odd feedyards; we could help you pick the right feedyard for you to go and custom feed them if you want to. We try to take the scary bits of doing new things out of it. We are really looking for ranches that want to improve, and this is all about continually improving.”
More information, including an explanatory video, can be found at breedr.co.
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