Animal Agriculture Could Still Benefit from New Technologies

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

The livestock and poultry industries have achieve tremendous efficiencies with how productive they can be. That begs the question: Is there still room for new technologies to offer further improvements. Stephen Murray thinks so. He leads the Ventures Team at Merck Animal Health.

Murray… “Whilst we might be making progress in dairy monitoring. That's well established, been out there for two decades and it's just beginning to move from early adopter into mainstream, and that will continue to be built out. But if you go to swine and poultry, the ability to early identify problems around health, et cetera, is much more nascent. There's not commercial solutions out there at this stage. There's some that are emerging. We've invested in PoultrySense ourselves. Or another disease might emerge that, you know, you get regularly in swine and poultry in particular, but new diseases emerging. And how might you manage those and what's the interplay of technology in those circumstances. So for example, biosecurity, not an area we are in, but we do see that you're going to see more technology helping solve that. Those solutions are starting to emerge.”

Murray and his teams invest in animal agtech startups.