Digital Monitoring for Livestock and Poultry

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

This week we’ve been reporting on the future of animal agtech. Similar to how crops have started with basic data collection from machines, animal systems are moving toward monitoring and data collection as well. Stephen Murray leads Merck Animal Health Ventures, which invests in disruptive technologies that improve animal agriculture.

Murray… “You're going to get monitoring across a poultry barn, a swine barn, on a beef farm in a different way, on a dairy farm. What I don't think we know is how that all, what that ecosystem and all the sort of results of that. So I can see that this makes perfect sense from an ROI and labor and other perspectives. But what's unclear is okay, when that becomes the norm. You know, when 50 - 70% plus of people are using monitoring. What's all the knock on consequences of that for consultancy, for suppliers, for the way you do field trial work. Now there's a whole different way of doing field trial work when you've got tens of thousands of animals being monitored. So there's all these sort of next layer of consequences that we can speculate on.”

Merck has had a major presence in animal agtech investing since their acquisition of Antelliq in 2018.