A Wave of Customer-Based Innovation
Our customers are essential to us – that probably goes without saying. Beyond the obvious business impact, they collectively make us better. Our varied customers, stretching across different species, needs and challenges, inspire ideas that help us grow and, in turn, bring them new advances. It’s invaluable experience that fuels a wave of innovation reaching everyone, wherever they are on their journey.
Many of our solutions are designed to meet the challenges farmers share with us. Take our dairy monitoring customers. For this well-established group, we are focused on building scale and reliable technology to provide real-time updates that increase efficiency and productivity on farms. We’ve been using our SENSEHUB® solution with them, making dairy farmers one of our most advanced customer groups.
With today’s technology, we have the monitoring tools and data-collection insights that allow dairy farmers to provide a deep level of care for their cows’ well-being and reproduction, which improves work-life balance and productivity on the farm, not to mention yield and profitability. These customers can target their time better, addressing the specific health needs of individual cows. That increased efficiency also can alleviate the growing pressure for labor.
Our advanced monitoring represents the future for other customers, like those in beef, poultry and swine. Our Vence technology, which brings virtual fencing to livestock management, is taking hold in the U.S. and Australia. Ranchers raising beef cattle are curious innovators excited about Vence’s long-term potential for their operations. We are learning many lessons as the virtual fencing guides beef cattle movement, such as how we can improve grazing land health and monitor animal location and movement. Vence’s sustainability advantages align with U.S. federal programs that support ranchers’ conservation efforts.
The common thread among our customers is their interest in animal well-being, sustainability and productivity. That starts with monitoring animal locations, as with Vence. It then extends to other species through the early-stage entrepreneurs we invest in, like the solution that tracks swine throughout their lifecycles, and the weighing technology for swine monitoring, which is helpful for tracking growth patterns.
Lastly, new customer groups for our company in the food chain industry, such as retailers, restaurant chains and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies, are at a pivotal moment, challenged by strong and growing consumer demand to understand where their food comes from and how animals were raised. We are collaborating with these customers on shared, workable solutions to enable a more sustainable future through data, information and insights.
Our customers are seeing that the future is now, and as our leading-edge technologies reach others, I’m excited for what it can mean for our industry. The innovation wave will eventually reach more potential customers, too, and our experiences with them will make it even bigger.
That’s why our customers mean so much to us – they are creating the future alongside us, invaluable partners on the journey to a digital world that improves animal well-being, makes our customers’ lives easier and aids sustainability, too. It’s a win for us all.
