It took five minutes for ag-tech startup founder Denis Tokarev to secure a $10,000 prize at a recent “pitch competition” in Calgary, but he hopes the buzz generated by the award as well as his networking with dairy sector stakeholders while in Alberta will eventually lead to a bigger payback for Guelph-based Cattle Scan.
Inventures 2024, a conference hosted by the provincial government’s Alberta Innovates thinktank, ran May 28-30 and featured a “Startup Pitch Competition” which this year attracted approximately 1,200 applicants from around the world. With $10,000 prizes up for grabs in six categories, the applicants were narrowed down to 30 invited to Calgary to make their pitch to audience members and a judging panel made up of venture capitalists.
Why it matters: Cattle Scan is one of several Ontario-based startups working to strengthen the ability of dairy producers to use data to improve their management and profitability.
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Cattle Scan, which Tokarev founded in 2020 after inventing a bolus-based system for internally monitoring health and reproduction parameters in cattle, was one of the five finalists in the “Growing Up” category focusing on agri-tech innovation.
A message sent out by the company said the award “is a significant milestone for us and validates the hard work of our team.” It follows up on a $250,000 prize won by Cattle Scan in November 2023 in the New York State-based Grow-NY Food and Agriculture Competition (another winner was Ontario-based dairy tech startup SomaDetect).
Speaking to Farmtario in early June, Tokarev explained the New York exposure provided a chance to meet with U.S.-based dairy stakeholders – an opportunity that led to what he describes as a new strategic partnership with the Dairy Farm ers of America (DFA) milk marketing cooperative.
DFA is now providing its members with information about and access to the Cattle Scan system – the key components of which are the “Betsy” bolus, an on-farm antennae with which it communicates once inside the cow, and an app that can host multiple accounts allowing the farmer to collaborate with nutritionists and veterinarians in making decisions based on the data collected.
The New York experience also led to a research collaboration with Cornell University – something Tokarev says will help the company demonstrate the benefits of the early disease detection and reproductive monitoring that the Cattle Scan bolus system offers.
With the Calgary pitch competition recently completed, he hopes the company experiences a similar degree of spin-offs from this award. The bolus is now in use in commercial herds in Ontario and the U.S. but he would like to see it gather steam across the rest of Canada.
“It was a good opportunity for me to go (to Alberta) and talk to producers about how they can hopefully increase the efficiency of their farm businesses,” Cattle Scan’s founder said about the Inventures conference. “I visited some dairy farmers, some Hutterite colonies, some vet clinics.”
Asked to recreate his pitch, Tokarev highlighted the efficiency, profitability and environmental sustainability benefits of the system.
“I talked about why we think it’s important to have this information (that is monitored by the bolus) . . . and how having access to this data from inside the cow makes us quite unique within the industry.”
“The value proposition (of Cattle Scan) is detecting health problems earlier than what happens on most dairy farms,” he continued. Citing an average lifetime total of 2.4 lactations for North American dairy cattle, he suggested early health event detection could extend that to between 3-4 lactations and decrease the costs for treatment.
“Along with this comes a potential opportunity for environmental sustainability in terms of producing more milk from fewer cows,” Tokarev said.
