CHARLOTTE BEUGGE HEARS HOW A PR BRAINSTORM PROMPTED INNOVATION AND CAPTURED THE IMAGINATION OF THE WORLD’S MEDIA
the success has been amazing,’ says Lonsdale. The UK farming sector is serious
business, contributing around 0.59 per cent to Britain’s gross domestic product. There are approximately 212,000 farm holdings using about 69 per cent of the land area, employing around 476,000 people with a further 30,000 jobs directly linked to the sector. And the National Beef Association has estimated that 9.92 million cattle roam the countryside. But animal trading remains very much in the dark ages. The traditional route to sell a cow is at a livestock market but, over the past ten years, about half of these have closed. This was the problem that SellMyLivestock sought to solve. Bairner explains: ‘It all started when Dan Luff, who is a beef farmer (and co-founder of Hectare) said to his friend Jamie McInnes that his local livestock market was closing down and that
would mean a really long trip to get his animals to market. The impact of transporting his animals further away would mean a reduction in the animals’ weight which would affect the prices they would attain. ‘Jamie was also concerned that he
would have to transport his animals to a market in a higher risk to TB area. So between them, they came up with the idea of SellMyLivestock, enabling farmers to trade animals easier.’ Hectare Agritech has also created
Graindex which allows online grain and feed trading. As well as cattle, SellMyLivestock trades in pigs, goats, other livestock, animal bedding and even bull semen: it now accounts for ten per cent of all livestock trading in the UK.
Bairner says farmers save both time and money by trading animals through SellMyLivestock and achieve better prices than through traditional markets.
While trading on the site is free, Hectare makes its money through associated services such as the payment service FarmPay, finance for stock purchases and transportation. For Lonsdale,
I think it
helped it was a dull week for business news
the campaign to promote Tudder opened his eyes to the way British farms work. But while trading in livestock markets is old fashioned and deals made ‘with a cheque and a firm handshake’, farmers are also comfortable with technology. ‘They use their mobile phones the whole time and a lot of farming is data-heavy.’ Looking to the future, Bairner says that there’s further to go for SellMyLivestock and Tudder. ‘Every head of cattle has an ear tag – it’s unique to them and is like a passport. We are developing an algorithm which will use all the data that’s contained on that ear tag – such as the genetic data and the milk yield. There’s so much data available and farmers need it to use it for breeding. Our algorithm will allow farmers to say what characteristics they are looking for and match them with animals which meet those needs.’ Maybe that’s an idea Tinder could
take on to create longer-term human couplings? Or is that just a load of bull? CC
CorpComms | February/March 2020 25
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
