
A Tinder-style app called Tudder lets farmers find breeding matches for cattle - montalbano
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-10/cows-get-tinder-app-as-u-k-breeders-seek-moo-love-for-herds
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jessaustin
_...a process that often involves transporting animals long distances for
breeding._

Cattle breeding, you're doing it wrong. Maybe it's different in UK, but on
every ranch I've ever seen, if the cows aren't just out with a bull or two for
a portion of the year, which bulls live the rest of the year in a nearby
pasture, they get artificially inseminated. The majority (I'm at 70% this
season) of those AI'ed cows get pregnant. The rest receive the attentions of a
pickup bull (sometimes after another AI attempt), which bull lives in the same
locale as the rest of the cattle. Very few commercially successful ranchers
are hauling cows a long distance to be bred.

It is good to get semen for AI from high quality bulls available from firms
like Genex, but UPS ships semen every day.

Maybe they were thinking of thoroughbred horses? That breed of that different
species has a live cover requirement for progeny registration, mostly to
preserve some variety. Like cattle breeders, thoroughbred breeders need a lot
more information than a picture...

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L_226
>>...a process that often involves transporting animals long distances for
breeding.

> Cattle breeding, you're doing it wrong.

Try selling cattle.

I was previously a co-founder at (the now defunct) CloudHerd, an online cattle
marketplace in Australia. We wanted to remove the requirement to physically
transport cattle from seller-farm, to stockyard (physical auction house), to
buyer (or back to seller if unsold). Massive waste of time and money, as well
as increased stress on the animals and pollution from additional transport
step.

~~~
jessaustin
That would be more plausible. Public stockyards are unhealthy places, and the
"arm's-length" nature of those transactions means the buyer should always
assume that purchased cattle are not as valuable as they seem. (For instance,
there is no testing for persistent BVD at auctions around here, nor is there a
requirement to declare such an infection if the seller knows about it. The
state vets will catch up with this in about a decade, at which point some
other disease they don't care about will be relevant.) Basically we view
public auctions as a "sink": cattle can leave the farm that way but they can't
enter from there. Many cattle that leave that way go to the food industry, so
there is a natural limit on the sale price. Even the buyers for that segment
would prefer to buy steers for which they know the breeding and health
histories, which is not really possible at a public auction.

At farm auctions, one or more large farms will sell their surplus stock that
has never left that farm and has received all the same care as the cattle
they're keeping. These make a lot more sense for cattle to introduce into
one's permanent herd, but the result is a sort of "rich get richer" effect
since only large farms with long histories can do this. We've gotten our last
several bulls this way, at a farm where the owner's _grandfather_ started the
auction in the _1920s_. It's also possible to purchase cattle in a private
sale directly, but this is so inconvenient for the seller that it's less
common.

I think there is a place for a tool that makes private sales less painful.
However, there are a number of challenges. On average, cattle people are
reluctant to use apps with the necessary complexity, and they are less likely
to trust the app itself. Also, it would be difficult to capture all the
relevant qualities of cattle remotely. How many private sellers have a scale?
How many of them keep vaccination records? How many of them know anything
about their cattle's EPDs? How many of them have even heard of persistent BVD
(or whatever other disease is locally relevant; I'm told that in Kansas,
pinkeye is still impossible to eradicate whereas we just vaccinate and forget
it)? Who will haul the cattle from seller to buyer and how will the cost of
that vary according to different buyers? Not all of these qualities will be
important to any particular sale, but some of these would be the way to beat
public auctions: get better prices for sellers and better cattle for buyers.

~~~
L_226
Yep you raise valid points. We reduced the impact of a few of those by
creating an inventory/farm management system that basically encouraged users
to enter relevant data like vaccination schedules, weights etc - which we then
piped straight into the auction system. So essentially the better your record
keeping, the more trustworthy your herd looked at auction. One of the (many)
difficulties was getting the farmers off of pen and paper records / excel
sheets and into our system.

~~~
jessaustin
There is a _lot_ of money waiting for whoever can help the beef and dairy
industries become more efficient. My theory is that before we try the big
"boil the ocean" stuff like a marketplace for private cattle sales, we need to
find smaller easier wins. Dominance of a small market could open up
possibilities for bigger markets.

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LyndsySimon
My dad taught agriculture for like 30 years. My sister teaches it now.

I’m ashamed I didn’t think of this :(

~~~
dbg31415
Especially for the sale of semen for artificial insemination. Most of it, from
what I've seen, is done via glorified mail-order catalogues. Tinder isn't the
right format, it's not a swipe sort of deal. It'd be more like OK Cupid where
you could filter on a set of criteria, metrics, and answers to questions.

There's still time to start OK Corral Cupid! (=

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jackcosgrove
When devising terms and conditions for an online classifieds project of mine,
the lawyer provided language prohibiting "stud service", which I always got a
kick out of. Is brokering "stud service" actually illegal anywhere?

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sbisson
Not seeing how that differs from the existing herdbooks that are kept for most
breeds which are used to manage AIS programmes; they're how for example the
Jersey and Guernsey remain distinct despite global distribution.

They've been digital for decades now...

~~~
jdavis703
When I worked at Issuu I learned we had tons of documents dedicated to bull
semen. For those interested in an industry few outside of ranching probably
know about you can take a look here:
[https://issuu.com/search?language=all&q=Bull%20semen&sortby=...](https://issuu.com/search?language=all&q=Bull%20semen&sortby=date&type=publication)

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dreamling
Article reads like an April fools'. Cute idea, but 'cow love' is business,
each bull has as many statistics as a baseball player.

Did you know that most dairy listings wouldn't even show pictures of the bull?
They're far more interested in the the Bull's daughters. (which you can see in
both the fancy print catalog, and often the online listings as well)/

Hectare, maker of the app according to the article does have some catalog
listings online, (like this one)
[https://www.sellmylivestock.co.uk/view/product/E0DE3752-5E89...](https://www.sellmylivestock.co.uk/view/product/E0DE3752-5E89-462C-9753-3FE8A20438CC?linked=&linkedPrice=)

and some other useful sounding sites/services like sellmylivestock and
graindex [https://www.hectare.farm/](https://www.hectare.farm/) so perhaps
it's the breezy article that makes the app seem so frivolous.

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benj111
The Yorkshireman in me wants to pronounce this as _T 'udder_.

Does anyone know if the founders were from Yorkshire?

To be fair I also thought the same about the VW 'E Up'
[http://www.britishslang.co.uk/slang/ey-
up](http://www.britishslang.co.uk/slang/ey-up)

~~~
Garvey
Came to say the same thing

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currymj
i held out a small hope, before clicking the article, that for some stupid
reason it would actually be the cows using the app and not the farmers. of
course i was always going to be disappointed.

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ganeshkrishnan
It's hard to swipe with hooves.

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microtherion
If this were written by a German developer, it would probably be called...
"Rinder"

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rsynnott
Or Rindr, for bulls.

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jackcosgrove
Wouldn't that be from an Austrian developer?

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fisherjeff
I initially read “cops” instead of “cows” and enjoyed the headline’s phrasing
maybe a bit too much.

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economistrator
I'm bullish on this idea.

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m0zg
You could say the idea is udderly obvious in retrospect.

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thedudeabides5
If anyone knows this for dogs pls lmk.

Tried singing up my golden retriever for tinder to find mates and they banned
my account.

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kkarakk
yes this is tinder working as intended. i wish they would ban users like you
quicker

