Case Study: Herd Management

(IoT Proof of Concept – currently in testing)

The Problem – herd management

Herd management is a complicated process for farmers, especially in major rural areas. Often farmers have thousands of hectares making disease management for heir herds very difficult. Disease can spread quickly through herds, and farmers’ livelihoods will be very seriously affected. The challenge is that disease management is a very manual process requiring herdsmen and women to be deployed on a regular basis to manually check the health of the herd of cattle for any signs of disease that could lead to loss of members of the herd. While heat-seeking drones may assist this process, direct disease management from individual heads of cattle can be difficult.

For insurance companies, herd insurance is complicated by the lack of data to accurately assess their risks. They face the same challenges faced by the farmer of disease spreading through a herd resulting in major claims. In the absence of very limited data, they are unable to proactively identify their risks.

The QORD Solution

The Technology

Instead of using a highly resource-intensive process of checking individual members of the herd, QORD used the biometric data produced by the Internet Of Things (IoT) tags placed in the ears of cows.

The QORD tags provide access to key biometric data to monitor the wellbeing of the individual members of the herd remotely. Instead of herdsmen and women having to manually test individual members of the herd, the herd could be collectively monitored remotely in the farmhouse to provide early warning signs of disease. This enables the farmer to make proactive decisions about their herd, by removing and treating diseased animals but reducing the risks of enhanced infection of the remaining herd by monitoring adverse trends.

To those insurance companies providing herd insurance this presents a major benefit. Instead of having to wait to monitor claims reactively, they are able to get access to proactive data. By having access to this data, they can more closely assess their risks and adjust insurance premiums accordingly.

The Payback

The direct cost benefits for the farmers is clear as they are

• in a position to optimise the utilization of their herdsmen and women and
• to closely identify individual diseased cattle reducing the costs of veterinary professionals who can be more focused on the areas that need to be managed more effectively.

For the insurance companies they are now in a position to proactively identify their risks and adjust their insurance premiums.

But imagine for a moment how this data could be redeployed

Once the data has been created through the innovative use of IOT devices, there will be multiple parties that would benefit from the use of that data.

For example, if there were pharmaceutical companies that wanted to test the efficacy of new treatments for herds, they would have the ability to access the same data on a herd by herd basis. Imagine the flexibility this would give the pharmaceutical companies. If they could sample test herd or individual cattle to isolate the changes in herd performance the data would provide deeper insights and data to provide the enhanced development of new treatments.

For the pharmaceutical companies they would not need to incur the upfront expense of installing IoT devices into the herd’s ears. Instead they can rely upon the data created by the QORD infrastructure.

QORD’s win-win model for farmers and other stakeholders

QORD is currently exploring the opportunity to create a new data model that helps the farmers in multiple different ways.

Imagine the farmers were able to get IoT devices installed in the ears of their cattle in their herds without charge .

For the farmers this means

1. They do not have the upfront costs of purchasing the IoT devices
2. They can monitor their herds remotely without direct costs
3. The costs are repaid from giving QORD access to the data to monetise it.

For the insurance companies

1. They only pay for access to the data to monitor their risk exposure
2. They do not have to pay for the IoT device installations

For the QORD platform, via the ADX

1. Other vetted and approved parties, who are interested in the data can purchase the data directly
2. They do not have to pay for the installation the IoT devices

In this way, there is a win-win for all parties concerned.

This is the future of data – the QORD way.

Ready to find out more?