Breedr: Precision livestock farming and trading straight from the field
An innovative digital platform created by a UK company, Breedr, is helping livestock farmers increase productivity and improve marketing by making cloud-enabled farming a reality.
The Need
Livestock in the UK are not always sold at the optimum time, meaning that profits are not always maximised and costs are often higher than necessary. On-farm data is collected via many sources, but it’s rarely pulled together to enable informed decisions to be made. Online marketplaces are few and far between in livestock, but Breedr allows farmers to track their animals throughout their life to improve transparency, optimise decision making and boost productivity, all while helping to reduce the environmental impact of meat production.
The Result
Breedr have developed a cloud based platform which is capable of pulling together multiple sources of data collected on-farm. This allows the farmer to make informed choices on a per animal basis, rather than at a herd level. In addition, Breedr Trading allows livestock to be bought and sold directly via the platform complete with a full weight and health history of each individual animal.
The company initially won an Innovate UK grant of over £236,000 towards their project costs. This helped Breedr to significantly develop its platform and build reliability for users. Following this, a project worth over £3.6 million to the consortia, of which Breedr are a part, has been won.
Since working with KTN, Breedr have grown from two employees to over 20 and are looking for additional members to join their team. Breedr were also an active participant in the 2018 KTN AgriTech Investor Showcase, securing a further £2m of private investment soon after this.
The company is now working with multiple leading partners in the livestock industry with the aim of providing transparency throughout the whole supply chain. Alongside this, the company is keen to help producers work towards farming’s 2040 Net Zero targets by improving efficiency, which will in turn lead to environmental impacts being reduced. Breedr are gaining recognition of the benefits it’s free app can offer to the 21st Century livestock farmer by helping to bridge gaps through the supply chain to provide transparency. As a marker of its success, Breedr currently have over 1,500 active farmers using the platform on a daily basis, which is a direct result of Innovate funding allowing commercialisation.
How did KTN help?
Working with the KTN for the past few years has really helped us to drive Breedr forward and develop early ideas into working realities. The partners that KTN have introduced us to have led to collaborations that have defined our position within the sector and allowed us to work with significant stakeholders. Their openness to our ideas has provided us with the perfect support platform to help us get to where we are today.
– Ian Wheal, Founder and CEO, Breedr
KTN started working with the company in April 2018 when they introduced Breedr to Dunbia, Europe’s largest lamb processor. This introduction helped to accelerate the development of the platform. Following on from this introduction, the AgriFood team supported the new partnership with a successful Innovate UK grant application in the Open Programme Round 1, winning a share of over £367,000 worth of grant. Breedr were one of 13 AgriTech companies that took part in the 2018 KTN Agri-Tech investor showcase and received substantial mentoring as part of this process. Following this, the company successfully raised £2 million of private investment. More recently, the AgriFood team have also helped Breedr to win a grant as part of a £3.6 million project funded in the first call of the ISCF Transforming Food Production funding scheme.