Cattler Corporation's Elevator Pitch:
Cattler is digitizing the cattle industry with a one-stop shop platform that integrates all the processes of a cattle farm in a unified app. Our platform helps the farmer save time with quicker operational tasks like feeding and makes it so the farmer does not have to transfer data between spreadsheets or different software. But it also allows them to save money by avoiding overfeeding or underfeeding and controlling inventories automatically. Cattler makes all these tasks easier because it reads from any device and brings all the information together in a very simple way.
How did you get the idea to start your company?
Our founding team is a mixture of cattle farmers and technologists. We began playing with computer vision as a way to predict animal weight—which is a key metric in the cattle business—with imagery instead of scales. We got to a prototype, but ultimately we understood that even if that was cool, in order to enable the farmer to make better decisions with it, we were still missing all the operational context around it. We discovered there was more value in bringing all the parts of the puzzle together, having a fully user-friendly platform, and not just having one cool sensor. That’s how we switched from sensors to what Cattler is today.
What does it mean to be a part of Plug and Play’s North Dakota Agtech Program?
It is not only a great honor to be part of this cohort, due to the great reputation of Plug and Play, but also a great opportunity to expand deeper into certain areas in the Midwest. Here, we can have a better chance to expose our system to more farmers, along with companies in the cattle ecosystem that are collaborating with Plug and Play.
If your product/service was already being used by everyone globally, what impact would that have?
It would make for more competitive cattle farmers who are more on top of their numbers but also more accountable to third parties and to society (financially, welfare-wise). Additionally, the cattle farmers would be more sustainable in the sense that Cattler also connects data from the productive side of cattle farming with the emissions side. It would also help build models to validate sensors for monitoring methane emissions and create new additives for mitigating the emissions.
Ultimately, our platform is helping to create a public asset of information that will drive the industry to a better position, inward and outward. Widespread use would also make the market more fluid—with a higher volume of business happening that we might facilitate and how much information is circulating—while at the same time protecting the privacy of data. It will make a more healthy and competitive industry, rolling out a new paradigm of how information is produced, used, and shared.
How are you incorporating growers into your business plan?
We ask our farmer members to recommend us to other farmers. We also ask feed and animal health vendors to do the same.
Where do you see your company in 10 years?
We see our company as the global leader in digital cattle farming, connecting all sorts of support services and companies to the industry and being the platform where everything happens.
By participating in Plug and Play’s North Dakota Agtech Program, what do you hope to accomplish? Have you considered expanding your operations to the Upper Midwest?
We want to achieve certain commercial agreements with the supporting industries (insurance, banks, animal nutrition) and also to expand our operations as much as we can directly with farmers. We already have members in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota (as well as Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri) and we want to turn both North Dakota and Kansas (both states where Plug and Play has a base) into growth hubs with the industry.
This magazine reaches 16,000+ farmers. In one or two sentences, what would you like to tell them?
Check out what we are doing, you might be surprised by what we have—give us a chance to show what we can do. We are constantly improving our platform based on the feedback farmers give us—they are the ones co-creating Cattler with us.
