At the end of 2018 you stepped down as chief innovation officer with Alltech, having worked for 28 years with the company. How are you getting on in your new role as CEO of ag tech company Cainthus?

It’s going really well. We have a really successful product but we’re now working on the challenge of scaling it, which is always the hard part. The challenge is to take this technology from one farm to 100 farms and then to 1,000 farms. You’ve got mud and dirt and dust and floods in farming, which makes it a challenging environment for technology to work in.

Describe the technology developed by Cainthus?

Cainthus has developed a smart camera system that collects images of cows inside a barn. The images are digitised and the technology starts to recognise behaviour from those images. By monitoring feeding, drinking and other indicators it can detect if there’s a problem with an individual cow. Once collected, the technology can convert that data into actions and alerts for the farmer.

How does this help the farmer?

A lot of farming techniques have been handed down from generation to generation, whereas this technology removes any human interpretation of animal behaviour. Diseases such as acidosis are accurately identified because the technology will pick up recognisable signs the farmer may have missed. The cameras also work for 24 hours, which is a big advantage as no farmer can watch their cows 24 hours a day.

How developed is the technology?

Right now, our technology is installed on 17 farms globally, most of which are in North America. These farmers are part of our innovation and are giving us extremely valuable feedback. In 12 months’ time we will be in a much more advanced stage. The exciting part is that the gains to be made in ag-tech are massive. Much bigger than anything else I’ve ever seen.

You recently published a new book on business planning. Explain the concept?

My new book is called ‘As simple as 2,1,4,3’ and it explains a business concept we used in Alltech for over 20 years. In the last five years, I’ve seen the concept work for other businesses outside of Alltech so I knew it was transferrable. The value of the system is that it helps companies set bigger goals and you generate those goals as a team, rather than from the top down. When you write down a goal and put it on a board it is much more likely to happen. Studies show it can be 50% more likely to happen and 80% more likely when you write it down and say it out loud in front of people. In the time I was with Alltech the company went from a $25m turnover business to $2.5bn turnover business because we set big goals.