Innovation awards profile: Richard Keenan & Company – food production platform

Keenan mixer wagons are a familiar sight on farms right across the world.

The distinctive bright green machines help farmers give their livestock the optimal feed mix which delivers the most efficient conversion of feed into milk or meat.

But Richard Keenan & Company goes far beyond the machine and has been developing physical feed mixes as well as other innovations over the years.

The latest innovation from the company is the Keenan inTouch, which is a food production platform which has the potential to link the entire supply chain from farm to processor to retailer.

It combines engineering, nutrition and IT technologies to deliver a repeatable result on farm which improves sustainability and profitability for farmer and processor.

It is the combination of the following elements.

At one end of the platform is inTouch Connect, a precision feeding system fitted to the mixer wagon which guides the operator step-by-step though the mixing process to ensure that the animals get the correctly balanced diet on a repeatable basis.

This system is connected directly to the cloud using Vodafone’s machine-to-machine technology allowing for a real-time feed of information to the inTouch centre in Kilkenny.

“The data from the mixer wagon comes back to us over the cloud,” explains Keenan business innovation director John McCurdy.

“We have developed digital signatures of what the best practice should look like and farms that fall out of that get an alert from us. A ticket gets raised at our nutrition team in Kilkenny. They will then get in touch with the farmer concerned wherever they are in the world and work with them to find a solution to the problem.”

There are 20 different parameters measured and any one of these, or indeed a combination of several, could cause an alert.

This could be as simple as using the wrong proportion of a particular ingredient in the mix. It could also be caused by a farmer using a mix quantity for more or less animals than it was designed for.

And the beauty of the system is that the optimal mixes are tailored to individual farms and their locations.

For example, a farmer in Australia may have a greater moisture content in the mix than one in Ireland and this is catered for by the inTouch system.

“While other systems are available which record feeding behaviour on farm inTouch is the first which feeds the data in real time to the cloud and analyses it for issues,” says McCurdy.

“This takes the system from being a data recording system to a live call-to-action system allowing advisors to work proactively to address anomalies before they become a major issue.

"It also combines the technology with a human interface. There is an abundance of data on farms at present. This system enables the data to be interpreted by a team of experts and then communicated to the farm."

Fitted as standard
The system was launched in 2012 and has been rolled out in Britain and Ireland.

It will now be fitted on all machines as standard leaving the factory which will bring it to all markets served by the company.

“We are also working with other companies who have expressed an interest in using the technology. This would see us licensing the platform to them.

“Our goal is to have an impact across the whole supply chain and this will help us achieve that.”