The world’s first digital exchange for livestock, Breedr lets British beef consumers soon enjoy more environmentally friendly, better quality meat on their plates. This is possible with the world’s first smart, data-driven beef contract. Now, the company raised £2.2 million in funding.
Welcomes funds from Innovate UK
Breedr just announced funding and partnerships that will use shared animal data to bring huge leaps forward in how farms can tackle efficiency issues. It transforms the role of agriculture in the global economy and boosts the UK agriculture sector by an estimated £540 million.
The funding includes £236M grant from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency. It will be used to lead the development of an innovative Smart Contracts system for the meat and livestock sector. Interestingly, it will use blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) to capture the complicated flows of data and transactions between multiple parties and improve transparency and trust.
This comes soon after the £2 million investment that Breedr secured from Local Global, Mons Investment and other industry angel investors, who joined early investors Forward Partners and Michael Pennington, founder of Gumtree.
Breedr is leading a consortium of farming groups, Imperial College London, the global leaders in DLT, and Dunbia, one of Europe’s largest processors of red meat, to create a solution that works for everyone. Total Innovate UK funding for the project is over £350k.
The funding will be used to invest in developing the Breedr platform, which enables farmers to get more back from their data, analyse performance and produce actionable insights to drive on-farm profit.
Ian Wheal, co-founder and CEO of Breedr said, “The beef, sheep and pig producers we are working with have a wealth of data about their animals and see our app as a way to add value directly. Today they might choose to see which animals are closest to the specification requested by their customers, but as more information is included they will be able to benchmark against other farmers in their group.”
Blockchain to manage livestock
Breedr claims that a lack of communication between farmers, processors and buyers makes things worse. It adds that only a meagre 1% of the UK agricultural research and development budget goes to farmer-led innovation.
By digitising the entire livestock production process, Breedr gives farmers the insights they need to deliver the right product for their customers.
It claims that with improved productivity offered by the Breedr platform, there will be a reduction in the average methane output from beef animals by over 50% in the UK. Eventually, farmers can meet the environmental benefit of their improved farm practices.
Gary Spence, a beef farmer from Northern Ireland who has been trialling Breedr, estimates the subscription platform is already improving his profit margins by up to £120 per cow.
“By using Breedr on our farm we’ve been able to identify the best and the worst performers; we’ve been able to use the data generated to see very easily the best farms to buy animals from, the best sires to use, (letting us) then eliminate from the herd animals that are losing our farm money. The app has also saved us a considerable amount of time, reducing paperwork by integrating with our regulatory systems.”
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