Providing farmers with real-time data
An inventive Ballinahinch beef farmer with a knack for using artificial intelligence is hoping his new website and app will help to paint a more authentic picture of beef prices nationwide. Within the space of a couple of days last week, Brendan Kennedy, a part-time beef farmer from Ballinahinch, developed his own artificial intelligence-generated website and app designed to provide farmers with real-time factory kill prices, mart auction data, agri-supply costs and anonymous price reporting.
Brendan says the concept is simple. The site, irelandcattleprice.com, gathers beef prices directly from farmers around the country – what they are actually paid at the factory – and displays these figures alongside the reported and quoted prices. Because farmers post their own prices, he says it builds a real, ground-up picture rather than relying on an official number. The site also tracks the cost of a number of inputs which hit farmers hardest, including grain, fertiliser, diesel and supplier prices. The site is free and Brendan says that its main objective is to “bring some daylight to beef pricing” and to “provide transparency for the whole industry”. “The factories know exactly what every farmer is getting paid. Farmers don’t. This site, this app, changes that,” he adds.
He also emphasises that his intention is not to take sides in terms of the relationship between farmers and factories. On the contrary. He says that “clear, honest pricing is in everyone’s interests, farmers and processors alike,” and that he has actually contacted processors in an attempt to get them on board. “I’d genuinely like the factories engaged in this, not shut out of it,” he adds.
The site garnered almost 2,000 views within the first three days and Brendan says that he is “always open to suggestions for how to improve it”. He says he wants to make this type of data more readily available and accessible to farmers north and south, and is hoping he can attract users and generate some traction over the coming weeks. If he can get farmers to engage and put in the prices they got off the factory, then the farming community will have a free, crowd-sourced website and app which records and displays prices in real time, he emphasises.
Interest in artificial intelligence
Brendan, who isn’t making anything financially from the venture and spent nothing creating it either, only developed an interest in artificial intelligence after Christmas. Since then, he has created a number of apps, but he says this is the one he is most invested in. He has a huge interest in farming, and he says that occasionally he found himself looking for certain types of information such as kill prices. The idea struck him that if he could collate such data and make it easily available to farmers for zero cost, he might be on to something. So one morning he asked artificial intelligence to build a tool capable of doing just that – gathering prices and other data and making it all available in one place. Sure enough, by the time he returned from work that evening AI had constructed a basic version of the site.
Brendan says he spent hours making small tweaks and changes but every time he added more information, the site continued to improve. Click on to irelandcattleprice.com today and what you’ll find is an impressive homepage with more or less all the information a farmer could want or need, including links to other relevant websites such as Agriland and Bord Bia. Brendan says he’s been contacted by various farmers across the island with inquiries and suggestions, and that he will continue to develop the site more over the coming days and weeks.
Asked to describe it all in a nutshell, Brendan makes an interesting comparison: “It’s like Massass,” he says. “Across any parish you have hundreds of people, but you don’t usually meet them until they go to mass, and then suddenly they’re all there together. The site is the exact same. Everything is there, together, in the one place. And it’s free.”
Further details
You can access the website at irelandcattleprice.com