Australian businesses collaborate to unlock more data for beef producers

LIVESTOCK data company, Black Box Co, and Australia’s most popular in-paddock weighing system, Optiweigh, have joined forces to make cattle data more accessible for beef producers.

The two small Australian businesses have worked closely together over the past year to build the smart integration, which will benefit producers by automatically marrying individual cattle weight data with additional information such as age, breed, sex, sire, dam, saleyard and source PIC.

Optiweigh’s founder, Bill Mitchell, said as a technology company, he sees it as their role to break down barriers to adoption and make data use in farm management as simple for producers and beef enterprises as possible.

“Our reason for being here is to help farmers get better results from their cattle business,” said Mr Mitchell.

“We want to see producers getting the maximum out of Optiweigh and the data they need to optimise production and profitability. We always had the view that information is much better if it is linked to other farm data.

“We are keen to make our data available to other systems where it adds value to the farmer and Black Box is a clear fit for us.”

The Armidale-based business initially built its two-foot cattle weighing systems as a farm invention, which was commercialised in 2019. Optiweigh systems are manufactured locally with 500 operational units around Australia and approximately 30 overseas, including many repeat customers.

“We have 330 different customers based from King island to Kununurra and 36 per cent of these customers have more than one unit,” he said.

“In total, we are recording weight data on more than 400,000 head of cattle.”

Black Box Co co-founder and CEO, Shannon Speight, said collaborations were important for the company and the beef industry more broadly.

“The pairing of the two systems is a win for producers. We understand how challenging it can be for them to gather data from multiple tech products and how time consuming this can be,” Ms Speight said.

“We want to empower them to see their cattle data in one location, and with this integration, the data collected from the Optiweigh devices will be automatically loaded to Black Box each day.

“Producers will be able to use the data to see the current average daily gain for individual cattle and make informed and strategic decisions on when to sell.”

While the Optiweigh system was initially designed and built to replicate yard weighing, Mr Mitchell said many producers were now using the units to continually monitor weights over an extended period of time.

“What we’ve discovered, is that producers aren’t just using it to replicate yard weight collection,” he said.

“They are leaving the system for weeks and months on end to look at the drivers of weight gain and how to improve it. 

“This provides insights into things such as the performance of different pasture types and the health status of the animals.”

More information about the Optiweigh and Black Box Co collaboration and how it can benefit beef producers will be discussed at an industry webinar next Wednesday, 6 December at 12.00 noon (AEST). Interested participants from across the beef industry can register online here.