>>...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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.