How CattleEye is improving the lives of farmers and their livestock through pioneering AI

From climate change to overuse of natural resources, energy conservation to managing waste, and water pollution to deforestation—it is clear that sustainability is everyone’s responsibility. Where big business may be slow to innovate, startups are increasingly at the forefront of disruptive thinking and pioneering solutions—with venture capitalists (VC) especially keen to fund sustainably-driven startups and their ideas.

Amazon research shows investors reward startups with a firm commitment to climate sustainability – with more than half of UK investors declining a startup investment opportunity due to concerns about a company’s sustainability credentials. By driving farming innovation powered by AWS AI solutions and sustainable services, CattleEye are a prime example of this kind of future-looking company.

Climate sustainability is of major importance to all industries today. Governments and businesses are reacting to consumer-led climate awareness, with public opinion increasingly shaped by the knowledge of those who are innovating, and those who are falling behind. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), sustainability is core to our proposition, with a focus on achieving 100% renewable energy by 2025.

 A revolution in livestock farming

Farming has been essential to the development of human society, changing us from hunter-gatherers to builders of cities and civilizations. Because crops and animals could now be farmed to meet demand, the global population has rocketed—from some five million people 10,000 years ago, to eight billion today.

This population growth, and the demands it brings, means the worldwide farming industry is going through a revolution to stay profitable, relevant, and sustainable. A problem that needs new ideas from inspired minds to address it. And when it comes to farming, there is a globally important question: how do you feed people while reducing your carbon footprint?

This is the question that Terry Canning, the son of a dairy farmer from County Armagh, Northern Ireland, pondered in 2004. Inspired by knowledge gained from his time building cloud applications for a number of telecommunications companies, he saw how digital technologies are driving innovation today, and spotted a massive gap for digitizing the livestock industry which was largely untapped.

From this insight, he founded farmwizard, the world’s first software-as-a-service (SaaS) for managing livestock. After exiting farmwizard, he wanted to take his ideas further by giving farmers new ways to drive efficiency through transformational ways of farming.

For Terry, this was about 3 key priorities, "If you can monitor livestock, you can do so much—you can help the farmer’s sustainability, help them to make money, and you can help the cows be better cared for. So, there's a triple-win there."

But how to achieve this farming innovation? An introduction to Adam Askew held the answer. Adam had led the AI team at a Belfast-based startup, digitizing human tissue samples to find cancer cells within. His deep technical AI expertise would be the key to help transform livestock management.

As Adam says, "If we can find a cancer cell in amongst millions of cells, we can find potential issues in a herd of cows."

After joining forces in a Belfast coffee shop one day, the idea of CattleEye was born—a deep learning AI-video analytics platform built on the AWS cloud—that can quickly detect and predict early signs of lameness in cows—giving farmers unparalleled insight into their herd's health. Lameness is a big problem in the dairy industry worldwide, ranging from 8% in pasture-based systems to 15%–30% in confinement,—which could cost dairy farmers up to £13,600 (US$18,720) a year in decreased milk yield.

Health, welfare, and sustainability all go hand-in-hand

For the team at CattleEye, the link between animal health, sustainability, and profitability cannot be overstressed. Their system monitors how cows walk to quickly identify those at risk before they go lame, removing the reliance on the human eye.

As Terry says, “If you're seeing your animals all the time, you don't really notice if they start to degrade, so human subjectivity is not efficient at picking up on early signs of the cow going lame.”

The advantages add up, as he says that lame cows have a higher greenhouse gas emission intensity figure due to inefficiencies in their body condition. “They cost the farmer more in healthcare, they’re less likely to eat, will produce less milk, and are also less likely to reproduce. And if a cow gets really lame, it has to be taken out of the dairy,” says Terry. “Really, we want the cows to live as long as possible because the first two years of a cow’s life you're investing, they've still got a carbon footprint, but you've no milk.”

This is CattleEye’s triple vision; healthier animals, more profit for the farmer, and better for the planet. For Terry, the value is clear, “In 20 years’ time, you wouldn’t be a serious farmer without using this kind of technology.”

An AI-first company needs a technology partner with AI at its core

The one thing Terry and Adam were clear about from the very start was that CattleEye is an AI-first company. Because without artificial intelligence, CattleEye wouldn’t be possible.

This was the core reason they chose AWS as their cloud partner, as they knew them to be at the cutting edge of AI, and what they needed was a partner who could help them continually outperform and outlearn the competition. Terry adds, "Because AWS gives us access to a large web of AI specialists, we've got to learn from, and work with, really great solution architects that have been amazing all the way."

As a member of AWS Activate—an AWS program that continues to provide more than $6 billion in credits to help startups experiment on the AWS cloud with little-to-no upfront cost —they received AWS credits enabling them to test new features and services, work out architecture, and gain access to like-minded partners and solution architects.

Terry states, “Right from the start, AWS formed a big part of our mission. In the AWS founders network, we became part of an ecosystem whereby startups spring up. Startups that know there’s potential funding available because they're making a positive impact, and who know they're eventually likely to get bought over because big companies have the problems they are solving.”

Importantly, AWS’ disruptive approach also appealed. “We’re striving to disrupt the whole dairy space, and they’re disrupting the cloud,” says Terry. “For us, time to market was really important, and I think everything AWS does focuses on speed and enabling customers to get there quickly.”

This is demonstrated by CattleEye adopting an all-in approach to leveraging AWS Managed Services in their AWS Cloud Strategy—such as AWS Step Functions, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Batch, Amazon Aurora, and many more. This approach had multiple benefits, allowing them to rapidly develop their product with minimal infrastructure management, and providing heightened security and reduced costs.

Attracting funding by aligning to big retail’s sustainability agenda

With about a third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions being linked to the food sector, for retailers, it is the market that is driving sustainability. Today, consumers, and therefore supermarkets, demand greater welfare standards from their farm suppliers. For instance, some supermarkets actively incentivize suppliers by paying a premium for animal longevity.

So, when Terry and Adam showed a demonstration of CattleEye to a well-known multinational supermarket, they quickly saw the opportunity to help their dairy farmers with health, welfare, and sustainability in an autonomous fashion.

Most importantly for Terry and Adam, the supermarket backing they received enabled them to secure their first investment of around half a million pounds—and recruit their first staff.

AI is big part of the sustainability plan

Sustainability is extremely close to Terry and Adam’s hearts. A major factor in choosing AWS was their initiatives around saving energy. Terry adds, “Running data centers, especially with AI, consumes a lot of water for cooling. AWS strives to actually be water positive rather than taking water out of the ecosystem, with their commitment to be water positive by 2030.”

They also take advantage of initiatives like Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. Terry explains, “EC2 Spot lets us use leftover computing power, so if someone is using 80% of a server, we are happy to use the other 20%—saving energy. And then there’s the Amazon Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, which lets you see how changes to your device selection impacts the carbon footprint of your product, which is exciting from a sustainability and technology perspective.”

With Amazon SageMaker—AWS’s end-to-end machine learning service—they use notebook instances, which can be shut down manually, or automatically, when they don’t need the environment anymore. And if they need more compute resources for experimentation, they can easily spin up a new environment in a matter of minutes with the capacity they need—all helping CattleEye to be more sustainable and save money.

Cows are just the start

Today, CattleEye is being used to monitor over 100,000 cows worldwide. They now have plans to expand beyond dairy into poultry and swine, even working with Queen's University and a multinational fast food chain on the poultry side. Terry explains “We can use AI as a mechanism to detect environmental events, like seeing something different in the chickens’ movement that could indicate there's an animal in the barn that shouldn't be there, increasing welfare and safety.”

And their global reach is expanding following their acquisition by GEA, tapping into their presence in 40 countries covering 10 million cows. The worldwide infrastructure of the AWS cloud network has also been instrumental in helping to ease deployment, and making it quicker for CattleEye to scale-up and meet demand.

When asked about advice for other startups, Terry says “I think you've got to find a value proposition that's not only about sustainability, you've got to be really, really customer centered. If you dream it up, it's possible to do. So, start with the problem, the customer, and the value—then find the partner that can do that with the same values as you.”

Today, CattleEye is proving what’s possible in sustainability, made possible by combining the most powerful AWS AI capabilities, with AWS Activate—the leading startup program bringing ideas to market.

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