An Australian company with a Canadian connection, Smart Paddock won the Rising Star category in the Canadian Animal AgTech innovation competition at Agribition in late 2024.
Smart Paddock’s founder and chief executive officer, Darren Wolchyn, moved his family from Alberta to Australia and ended up working on GPS-tracking golf carts. Ranching friends in Alberta suggested he help them GPS-track cattle, and the company was born.
The technology’s target market is cattle on the range or in remote locations and uses solar-powered tags, installed on the back of a cow’s ear, to keep track of them.
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When they begin using the system, ranchers usually start by tracking bulls — but other uses include tracking herd movement and where cattle have grazed. It can also be used to predict calving and identify potential problems, such as access to water.
Wolchyn says the solar power on the ear tags sets the product apart. The cattle can then go out onto a range without worry about how the tracker is powered.
Once the property is mapped out, the tracker is designed to give alerts about an animal that has strayed from the herd or is down.
As each animal is tied to GPS co-ordinates, it’s easy for the producer to track the animal’s location.
Marking important points of management on the farm can help producers understand how it is being used and see if an animal is not visiting a lick or a supplement feeder at its required intervals.
Many producers opt to start out tracking their most valuable animals. “Ideally I’d like you to track all of your animals, but some guys track their bulls to start with,” Wolchyn said at Agribition. “If they stray, they are worth a lot of money.”
“On an individual animal, we will model what normal behaviour is over several days and then we will look for a drop in behaviour for that one specific animal.”
Once an individual animal’s behaviour is understood, lessons can be learned from how that animal reacts to its environment.
Cohorts of the herd can be managed, such as tracking all first-calf heifers as they are more likely to have calving problems.
From an even wider perspective, Wolchyn says 10 per cent of the animals in a herd can be tracked for herd-level understanding of movement and feeding patterns.
“We’ll look at the grazing patterns over the whole herd over a week,” he says. Producers can see what areas of the pasture are being grazed and what areas are being left. Adjustments can be made to the herd management, or to the future management of the grazing land.
For example, maybe a temporary fence is needed, or a watering point can be moved to encourage more balanced consumption of the grass, he says.
Farmers can interact with the maps and data through a computer screen and a smartphone app, allowing for use and sharing of the data anywhere.
The app is focused on notifications, to let a producer know about an event in the pasture — say, for a stray animal, or an animal that’s calving.
The company has been selling the system in Australia and is now expanding to North America. It has some systems running in Saskatchewan and Alberta.
“We’re not a solution for a feedlot. We’re not a solution for a pasture around your house. We’re really for the bigger grazing areas,” Wolchyn says.
