Ag-tech businesses Maia Technology (the technology behind MaiaGrazing) and Agersens have agreed to work together to create a system to increase the productivity, profitability and sustainability of livestock producers – and have signed a Memorandum of Understanding. With Agersens building their product on the Maia Technology platform, the two companies will deliver the world’s first fully automated holistic grazing system that will revolutionise livestock farming globally.
The idea is to create a single seamless system combining the power of MaiaGrazing software for planning, gathering and analysing farm data to improve decision-making, with Agersens’ eShepherd smart livestock system, which offers virtual fencing, herding and animal monitoring, all via a smartphone or tablet.
Farmers will be able to plan their grazing and feed budgeting, and action those decisions by automating the movement of stock from paddock to paddock, without fences or gates.
Agersens Chief Executive Officer Ian Reilly said “We are aiming to launch eShepherd in early 2018, and are already seeing significant industry demand and expectations. We are excited to be able to launch with a complete, out of the box livestock solution, combining our world-leading technology for automated animal movement, monitoring and data collection with the sophisticated grazing management capabilities of MaiaGrazing.”
The combined solution will enable farmers to cut costs, produce more, and capture valuable information to enable more rapid and enhanced decision making by farmers and others throughout the food production value chain,” he said.
Agersens is using the Maia Technology software platform announced in April this year to develop eShepherd, enabling it to provide comprehensive herd management functionality. Thanks to the common platform, users will also be able to seamlessly combine this with the planning, forecasting, advanced analytics and grazing decision support in MaiaGrazing.
“This is not only a first for the ag-tech industry but a win for producers who will benefit by having to only manage one simple system that uses best of breed ag-tech solutions – saving administration and cost and avoiding managing multiple apps or programs,” Ian added.
Maia Technology Chief Executive Officer, Peter Richardson said the company’s first product, MaiaGrazing is gathering increasing interest from producers in Australia and overseas.
“We launched the Maia Technology platform and ‘ecosystem’ when it became clear that the ag-tech industry urgently needs an operating system which will allow collaboration between developers and a means of allowing data to flow seamlessly from one app to another.
“Our partnership with Agersens is an example of this collaboration, which will see producers benefit from the coming together of these two ag-tech innovations, providing the rich functionality of both via the one platform.
“We are collecting a lot of valuable and insightful data from producers, but rather than isolate this and use it only for our own MaiaGrazing product, we welcome other innovators such as Agersens so that together, we can provide a one-stop solution for grazing management, instead of producers buying into lots of different software and systems,” said Peter.
“We invite other innovators in the livestock sector to utilise our Maia Technology platform to speed up time to market, simplify user experience, reduce user costs and leverage data from other related apps across the ecosystem,” he said.
“It is an exciting time to be in agriculture and be able to collaborate together to offer the global farming community the opportunity to dramatically improve the productivity, profitability and sustainability of their farming enterprises through the application of world first technology.” concluded Ian.
