Strongbo is an Irish company set up by mechanical engineer Michael McInerney and software developer Ivan Wahirab.
Michael grew up on a beef farm in Co Galway and was always interested in mechanics and how things were designed and made.
“I [saw] an opportunity on beef farms where more data could be captured to help farmers in their day-to-day management of the farm.
"The dairy industry is probably ahead of the beef industry when it comes to using data.
"Weighing was an area where I could see improvements could be made, so I went about developing the weigh scales."
Weigh scales
The product is a stand-alone solar-powered weigh scales with a drinker attached so animals have to stand on to the scales to be weighed.
Animals are EID-tagged and the reader on the unit identifies the animal when the animal steps on to the weigh scales.
The unit captures the animal’s weight and sends it to a cloud-based database developed by the Strongbo team.
The database then processes the data into user-friendly reports so farmers can view the data on a daily and weekly basis.
The beauty of the system is that it reduces the amount of labour required to weigh cattle on a beef farm.
The weighing system can take hundreds of weights daily and uses these data points to generate an accurate weighing report.
Met some really interesting people with some great products in the Enterprise Ireland Innovation Arena.This company developed an automatic weighing system for cattle.Could be a game changer for weighing @FJBeef @farmersjournal farmersjournal.More on https://t.co/B58bv2SqtV pic.twitter.com/jBqmMvMqpk
— Adam Woods (@ajwwoods) September 20, 2019
Indoors and outdoors
The unit can be used indoors and outdoors and comes on a platform, so doesn’t have to be levelled in a field-based scenario.
Artificial intelligence is able to determine whether two animals are on the scales at the same time and cancel out that weight.
The ability to know what is happening with weight gain in a group of animals is hugely beneficial to farmers and could lead to management decisions being made quicker to rectify poor weight gain.
The system has the ability for others such as nutritionists or farm advisers to login to your account and analyse the weight data.
The system is retailing around €3,100 and is still in the testing and development stage.
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