One day, my dad was sitting at home in the kitchen and he looked agitated, so I asked him what was wrong and he said he was wondering whether or not he should go to Ballinasloe mart with a few animals,” says Marie Costello from Moate in Co Westmeath.

“I said to him: ‘Why don’t you go?’ He answered: ‘Sure I can go now but I don’t know whether the prices are good, so I don’t know if I can even sell them or not. I’ll waste a whole day at the mart, come home and have the world of herding to do. But if I don’t go, I won’t know the prices for the week, or even the day.’ I asked him was there no source available that he could look it up online and he said no, there’s nothing for farmers.”

So Marie decided to take matters into her own hands and developed Emarts Daily, an app and website which provides farmers with daily livestock prices to their smartphones. Prices are in real-time.

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Users can view the daily prices on their phone from marts and decide whether and where they should sell their animals. However, the product still has a long way to go before it can be fully utilised by the farming community. Emarts Daily is currently set up with just two marts – Ballinasloe and Tullamore – and while Marie is ambitious about her product being rolled out nationwide, she may have a significant, or at least lengthy, challenge in getting every mart on board.

Getting started

Marie started working on Emarts Daily last September, when she started a Level 8 HDip add-on in Entrepreneurship in Athlone IT, which required students to come up with a practical, entrepreneurial idea. One of her initial steps was to approach Ballinasloe mart with the idea, where she says she received a warm reception.

“We went in and looked at their set-up and that’s how we created a piece of software to integrate with the system at the mart.”

Emarts Daily pulls down the prices and all the information regarding the animals: the breed, weight, whether they’re male or female, and pushes that out in real time.

“So as soon as an animal is sold in the ring, the price is sent straight with that information to the farmers’ smartphone, one after the other,” says Marie.

She has a degree in Business Computing from Athlone IT and says this helped hugely with developing Emarts Daily, but she also brought in an app developer friend “for the very, very tricky bit that I couldn’t understand”.

Online mart entry

Emarts Daily also has a feature where farmers bringing animals to the mart can enter their own livestock online. Then the night before a sale, their lot numbers will be sent back to them and they’ll then know what position they are in at the mart. This technology also has an online classified section where farmers can advertise.

“It’s only €25 for the year for the farmer to subscribe,” says Marie, “and he gets the full package.”

Marie was encouraged with her endeavours by a youth innovation programme run by Enterprise Ireland, which helps young entrepreneurs develop ideas and get their technologies to market.

“The innovation programme has two streams and one is for high-potential start-ups,” says PJ O’Reilly, a regional manager with Enterprise Ireland, “and the other is the innovation centres in the third-level institutes. This is where we met Marie.”

Marie says Enterprise Ireland, especially PJ, have been a great help.

“You could call them whenever you wanted,” says Marie. “They gave me great support with filling out applications for funding, anything like that, you could ring up and get your application reviewed before you sent it in.”

New markets

PJ thinks Marie’s programme has a great future: “I think that Marie’s technology can be applied in different areas. You could exploit it for any event that’s in real-time.”

In this regard, Marie has plenty of ideas: “I want to take it into the equine market as well, it would also work well for auctions.”

It wasn’t just Enterprise Ireland that helped Marie get her business off the ground. Accountant Michael Dolan came on board through Opportunity in a Million (OIM), which is a new charitable entity in Athlone where professionals with different expertise come together and volunteer their time to help new businesses.

OIM provided Marie with funding and mentoring support, especially to help her get set up at the Ploughing. She says they are an excellent support for any business starting out: “Get in contact with them. They’re willing to help in any area.”

Marie’s hard work has been rewarded with the Young Innovator Award in the Toplink arena at the Ploughing last week. Such an accolade means a lot to a fledgling business: “As a start-up it gives you great motivation to keep going, to keep selling and to grow and grow,” says Marie.

Not only that, but Emarts Daily is also going to receive recognition at the world’s biggest tech hang-out, the web summit, which takes place over three days in the RDS in November.

“I’m the first ever agricultural business technology company to enter the ALPHA programme at the summit,” says Marie. “There were 18 candidates selected and I was one of them, out of 193. They don’t normally take on agricultural businesses, but they might have a section for agricultural technology companies next year, depending on how I do.”