Smart Paddock

Smart Paddock, founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 2017, provides a comprehensive livestock management platform for farmers. The company’s inception stems from founder and CEO Darren Wolchyn, an electrical engineer who grew up on a farm in Canada. His experience building a GPS fleet management system for golf carts, combined with a request from a ranching friend in Canada to track cattle during calving season, sparked the idea for the company. Wolchyn initially developed a prototype which he showcased at Australia's Beef Week, where significant interest from farmers validated the concept and propelled the company forward.

Operating in the AgTech market, Smart Paddock targets the global red meat industry, which has been historically underserved by smart-tagging technology compared to the dairy sector. The company's clients are primarily mid-to-large-scale farming operations with large grazing areas, as well as smaller farms seeking enhanced monitoring for high-value animals like bulls and heifers. The business model is centered on selling hardware, the smart ear tags, coupled with a yearly service fee that covers software access, data analytics, and support. Smart Paddock has secured funding from investors including Breakthrough Victoria, Telstra's muru-D, Skalata Ventures, and Twynam.

The core of Smart Paddock's offering is the "Bluebell" smart ear tag, a solar-powered GPS device designed for cattle and sheep. This tag is notable for being reusable and utilizing a supercapacitor for energy storage, eliminating the need for batteries and extending its operational life. It provides real-time, 24/7 monitoring of a livestock's location, movement, and temperature. The collected data is transmitted via LoRaWAN (long-range wide-area network) technology to a central platform, which can be accessed by farmers through a web dashboard or a mobile app. This platform translates raw data into actionable insights, providing alerts for critical events such as stray or stolen animals, downed animals, lack of movement, and even potential calving activity. By modeling an individual animal's normal behavior, the system can detect anomalies that may indicate illness or distress, allowing for early intervention. This capability aims to reduce preventable livestock losses and improve overall herd health and productivity. In addition to the tags, the company offers other IoT sensors for farm management, such as water tank level sensors and electric fence monitors.

Keywords: livestock management, AgTech, GPS tracking, smart farming, cattle monitoring, animal health, precision agriculture, IoT sensors, farm management software, real-time data, LoRaWAN, solar-powered tags, Bluebell tag, Darren Wolchyn, livestock analytics, herd management, pasture utilization, animal welfare, biosecurity, calving detection