What is Moocall?

Moocall is a calving sensor mounted on the tail of a cow that measures the contractions during the animal’s labour. Once the sensor detects an increase in these contractions, it will send a text message and email to the farmer an hour before the calving process will begin.

What benefit does it deliver for the farmer?

The main benefit of Moocall is that it will save calves at risk during a difficult birth. It puts the farmer at the back of the cow during calving and allows them to then assess how to proceed. It also assists in better time management for farmers, saving them from checking cows unnecessarily – particularly for farmers who don’t live on the farm.

How capital intensive is developing a new start-up technology business?

We’ve invested over €4m into the business to date to get us to where we are. I would safely say our investors are very happy with the progress we’ve made and would like to see a return on their investment in time.

How do you begin to successfully market a new agri-tech product?

We started with a multi-pronged approach to rolling Moocall out to the market. It was almost a scattergun approach to see what worked and what didn’t. We tried retail, direct sales and distribution channels and we’re now working directly with genetics companies.

Since launching the product how many markets have you entered?

We’ve distribution partners in Finland, Germany, Norway, France, Italy, Australia and New Zealand, and we’re very close to signing seven to eight more partners in Europe and into China. We get a very large interest in our product wherever we go because of the novelty factor, and the entry-price point is affordable to everyone.

What’s the greatest challenge of scaling into a global exporter?

It’s hard when you’re trying to stay focussed on certain markets and customers in other markets are coming at you and trying to throw money at you. The challenge there is that you only have limited resources and you want to make sure you’re getting the job done in the jurisdictions you’re prioritising. You can’t start throwing units all around the world and getting a bad reputation because you’re not giving the market the attention that you should be.

At what point did you decide to start exporting your product?

We were selling the product for nine months in Ireland before we looked to start exporting. We wanted to get through the teething problems. At present, 50% of our sales are within Ireland, but as global presence grows Ireland is going to become a smaller and smaller part. We currently have 8% market penetration of calving cow operations in Ireland and I would hope we can get it to get to 20%. Ireland and the UK are very much our biggest markets right now, with France, Germany and the US following close behind.

Ag Tech Conference:

The inaugural Ag Tech Conference will take place on Wednesday 29 March in the RDS, Dublin 4, and is brought to you by the Irish Farmers Journal.

Emmet Savage will be speaking at the conference along with many other high profile speakers. For the full list of speakers CLICK HERE.

Early Bird tickets €109 until 17 March, thereafter €149

Tickets can be purchased HERE

For Agri Careers exhibitor discounts please contact 01-4199578 or email events@farmersjournal.ie

Keep an eye out here for more information closer to the date or register here to receive email updates.