Not everyone is an entrepreneur, but an entrepreneur can come from anywhere

Lincoln, Neb. — One of the first things they teach you is sick cattle don’t eat, and cattle that don’t eat get sick. Cowboys who care for animals are looking for signs of illness like a cow’s head dipped below the shoulders. Is the calf lean around the rib cage? Are they loners, away from the herd, their haunches dirty from lying down too much? As one cattle expert explains, “Something’s not right. They’re not getting groceries.”

For hundreds of years, the steak on your dinner plate has hinged on a cowboy’s ability to care for and manage animals on horseback. In the U.S., there’s more than 29 million cattle, and about 22.5 million are on feed or cared for on feedlots. In enclosed environments, pen rider-cowboys monitor cattle until they’re brought to a marketable weight to be sold.

It’s summer at a feedlot in Milford, outside Lincoln, Neb. In the middle of the Great Plains, amid vast stretches of rangeland and pasture, the grass is green-gold and crunchy from the dry heat. Look around. You’re bound to see cows as they outnumber humans four to one in this region. And even though it’s early morning on a feedyard, there can be a steady stream of visitors. Feed truck drivers. Veterinarians. Maintenance guys. Laborers. Everyone is hustling to care for animals and prevent illness that one in five cattle will develop. Sickness, death and related health issues cost the U.S. cattle industry more $3 billion a year. “It’s a massive business problem,” says local agriculture tech entrepreneur Vishal Singh.

Growing up as a kid in Nebraska, Vishal did not dream of becoming a cowboy. He had no plans to end up in ag. Vishal was born in New Delhi. Back in India when he was a kid, there was talk of moving to America. His father, a retired Methodist minister, had a close college friend in Nebraska. An agricultural community and small town vibe sounded appealing. So the family moved from New Delhi, population 21.8 million to Nebraska’s Kenesaw, a village of roughly 900 people.

As Vishal settled into school life, one trait emerged that would help drive the course of his life. “If I find something boring or not interesting, I just don’t do it.” What engaged Vishal were things like robotics. But there was no robotics class in small town Kenesaw. So Vishal persuaded his high school woodworking instructor to allow him to independently build a robotics kit. While Vishal had an affinity for science, he also craved creative problem solving. Art and computer graphics occupied his mind. “What interests me is being able to be creative, and not trying to be like somebody else,” Vishal said. “I like to do my own thing.”

The Medici effect and unlocking innovation

Vishal’s early career included various jobs at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. At one point he learned Frans Johansson, author of the “The Medici Effect,” would be in town for a conference on the future of rural regions. Author and entrepreneur Johansson champions diverse backgrounds, and following your curiosity to a serendipitous career path. Johansson, whose father is Swedish and mother is African-American and Cherokee, found he had a better chance of creating big innovations by combining ideas from different cultures and fields. (The Medici effect alludes to the Medicis, a banking family in Florence who funded creators. Their cultural and artistic innovation forged what’s known as the Renaissance.)

To fully grasp how the Medici effect unlocked Vishal’s mind and created a road map for a non-ag guy in Lincoln by-way-of-New Delhi to tackle a generations-deep American cowboy problem, you need to know how innovative ideas are hacked. Johansson’s thesis calls out two kinds of innovation. First, directional ideas are linear and expand incrementally. The gist is evolving an established idea through refinements and adjustments. The second kind of idea—intersectional innovation—involves breaking down seemingly unrelated cultures and industries, and figuring out how pieces from each discipline might create whole new businesses. This mining of the intersection of fields, taking on multiple perspectives, and reversing assumptions is at the heart of the Medici effect.

Seated at a table with his co-workers at the Lincoln Cornhusker Hotel, Vishal’s mind was on fire. I’m a multi-disciplinary guy! That’s me! Vishal, equally curious about the arts and sciences, had often felt torn. He sought an academic major that would bridge both sides of his brain. “I looked.” Nothing. “So I just bounced back between the two,” he recalled. Standing in front of the audience, it was as if Johansson was sending Vishal secret smoke signals. Pursue robotics, drones, whatever else your heart desires. It all intersects.

The Medici effect cleared a pathway for Vishal to embrace his curiosity unencumbered. He followed his interest in computer graphics, radio control flight and eventually agriculture—though he couldn’t see that yet. And just like that, a life changed.

Author Frans Johansson, credit: Rich Ciro Janniello, Ciro Photography

One other small, but important detail about creating the Medici effect. Intersectional innovations take advantage of unexpected combinations to create new, meaningful connections. By unlocking whole new fields, you’re leaping and bounding toward potentially groundbreaking changes. Vishal wasn’t interested in improving something old through incremental, safe tweaks. He was gunning for whole new advances that might alter the landscape of beef production and animal care.

Years later in 2015, Vishal was in Kearney, Neb. with his future business partner Andrew Uden. The two, along with Brian Schupbach, co-founded their startup Quantified Ag. They sat on bleachers and watched a cattle handling demonstration. Andrew looked down and recognized Dan Thomson sitting in front of them. Dan, also known as Dr. Dan, is a longtime expert on beef cattle production and animal welfare. He hosts a national veterinary show, “Doc Talk,” and has worked with global fast food giants and beef consumers like McDonald’s. The guys introduced themselves.

Thomson half watched the cattle demo and wondered, Are they beef guys? Animal rights activists? Andrew in fact is a fifth-generation cattleman on his father’s side, fourth-generation on his mother’s side. If Vishal has what you might describe as a Silicon Valley wardrobe (a.k.a. khakis and a polo shirt), Andrew doesn’t mind cowboy boots and a shiny, belt buckle. As they chatted, Vishal smiled. “The first thing that struck me when I saw him was this guy is brilliant, and always in a good mood. This guy has such an infectious smile,” Thomson said. “What drives him is underneath that smile. And that is a competitive person who wants to invent things. He just wants to see where he can take the technology.”

An accidental entrepreneur rises

Vishal was working various jobs at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Then in 2000 he landed at the campus’ Distributed Environment for Active Learning Laboratory or DEAL lab, a kind of incubator-mini startup space that encouraged creative thinking. The goal was to take ideas from faculty and graduate students and help them develop proof of concepts to solve agricultural and food production problems. Vishal found his people.

Given the campus’ location in Nebraska, many of the projects involved agriculture, a field Vishal hadn’t exactly chased. But in the context of the DEAL lab, Vishal began to see how he might apply his interests including technology to troubleshoot challenges in ag and food production. “They valued people who wanted to work on innovative things and come up with new ideas and new ways of doing things,” Vishal said. “That was really the biggest thing for me.”

An early project involved taking static images of a cow’s major beef cuts and categorizing them in a database. He proposed using medical scans to reconstruct a 3-D version of bovine anatomy. “Essentially we were left with a fully textured 3-D beef carcass, basically, that you could take apart muscle by muscle, bone by bone, and all of those were linked up to the database of information," Vishal said. "It was a fully 3-D interactive version of it.”

Vishal helped develop 3-D technology to teach students bovine's muscular system. Credit: University of Nebraska-Lincoln

His 3-D model in tow, Vishal spoke at some cattle industry events. Guys would approach and ask detailed questions. “I remember this guy walked up to me after one of my talks and he said, ‘Wow, you’re like an entrepreneur because you’re really trying to take what you’ve done and you’re trying to create new things out of this,” Vishal said.

“I was like, ‘Oh, really? Am I an entrepreneur?’ I think that was a really big deal for me, just thinking of myself in a different way.”

In his mind he ceased to be the guy who was torn between too many interests, and became the guy who was curious about a lot of things that would eventually connect and lead to something big. The 3-D model under his belt, Vishal started to see agriculture as an intriguing puzzle that technology might help unlock. He tucked into the notion of becoming an entrepreneur. But an innovator of what exactly?

WANTED: Cowboys and young people to work in agriculture

Lincoln, population around 280,000 is one big small town. That means when you’re growing up and get into trouble, your parents find out because everyone know everybody. The city is anchored by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Pinnacle Bank Arena, a busy area venue that has a capacity of about 15,500. Invariably cattle and beef come up in conversation.

Beef is the state’s largest industry. From a cow’s point of view, Nebraska is one giant lunch counter. Cattle turn grass from 24 million acres of rangeland and pasture—more than one half of Nebraska’s land mass—into protein and many other products for humans. A common debate is, which is the best steakhouse in town, Single Barrel or Misty’s? Go. Cow’s blood can be described as mere “steak juice.” And the shape of the state capitol building, nicknamed the something of the Prairie, well it’s just unfortunate.

When you drive beyond Lincoln toward numbered roads, it’s easy to see why the beef industry flourished in the Great Plains. Plentiful water supplies including deep underground aquifers and thick carpets of grass have fed hoofed mammals, a category sometimes known as ungulates, for thousands of years. First there was bison. Then in the 16th century the Spaniards brought cattle. “If you were going to create the Garden of Eden for ungulates, you would have conjured up Nebraska,” said one historian in the documentary “Beef State.” Over centuries, local cattle evolved into the Texas Longhorn, known for its characteristic horns. The breed of cattle has a high reproductive rate, strong resistance to disease and ability to fight off predators.

Three states—Texas, Kansas and Nebraska—account for 44 percent of total U.S. cattle and calves sales, according to the Census of Agriculture.

America’s beef industry emerged during the Civil War. Isolated by the union army’s blockade of the Mississippi River, Texas had trouble exporting its cattle to the southern states and Great Britain. By the Civil War’s end in 1865, there was too many cattle in Texas and too few people. But in the north, demand for beef was high. A $4 steer in Texas was worth $30 to $40 in the north, according to Nebraskastudies.org that details the region’s history.

Every cowboy knows a steer will fetch what the market will bear. Cowboys-turned-cattlemen joined trail drives to chase their fortunes. Texans drove cattle north to meet the railheads or furthest points of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railways in the Great Plains.

Driving cattle in Nebraska, 1875. Credit: Nebraska State Historical Society

Cattle were eventually transported to Chicago and commercial beef packing plants, then to beef consumers across the country. Artificial refrigeration allowed for year-round production. Cottonseed oil-mill operators had built the first widespread cattle feedyards in the 1850s, according to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Until then, cattle was inefficiently moved based on grass locations. The supply chain had finally been linked. Beef demand in America and Europe exploded. 

Today three states—Texas, Kansas and Nebraska—account for 44 percent of total U.S. cattle and calves sales, according to the 2012 Census of Agriculture. Sales of cattle and calves from feedlots totaled $36.4 billion, accounting for 9 percent of total U.S. agriculture sales. Beef is exported globally. The top U.S. beef export markets are Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Canada, Hong Kong and the Middle East. The U.S. is resuming beef shipments to China after a 14-year hiatus related to a U.S. scare over mad cow disease.

While the total U.S. cattle complex is a $76.4 billion industry, 19 percent of total U.S. agriculture sales according to the Census of Agriculture, there are challenges including an aging workforce. Ask any feedyard manager and they'll tell you finding younger, skilled employees willing to do the jobs necessary to keep a feedlot running is a struggle. “The largest shift is that attracting people to rural areas has become a greater challenge,” according to a 2015 state feedyard survey conducted by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The average age of a principal beef cattle rancher in America is 58.3, according to government data. 

The 2012 Census of Agriculture offered a sliver of hope about younger farmers. Data showed an increase in principal farm operators ages 25 to 34 since 2007. However, principal operators under the age of 25 declined.

The average age for principal operators of all U.S. farms rose to 58.3 years in 2012, continuing a 30-year trend of steady increases. Detailed further, 33 percent are 65 and older, 61 percent are between the ages of 35 and 54, and 6 percent are under 35, according to the Census of Agriculture.

Drive outside Lincoln and you’ll find pen rider-cowboys and cowgirls in their 30s and up, with feedlot managers in their 40s and older. Despite the Lincoln area’s many charms, a job in animal rearing or on any farm isn’t for everyone. Work is a steady stream of chores beyond 9-to-5. Your cellphone rings on weekends, and it’s one thing after another. You’re managing an entire operation that’s centered around living animals.

Pen rider Landon Riley (left) and startup co-founder Andrew Uden are among a shrinking pool of agriculture workers under 40.

And a pen rider-cowboy’s wages have not kept pace with the income gains of feedlot office managers. In 2015, base salaries and hourly wages averaged across feedyard job categories rose 20 percent and 15 percent respectively from 2010 levels, according to data from the Nebraska feedyard survey.

Broken down further, though, an office manager's income gains are far outpacing a cowboy's earnings. A manager’s average total compensation jumped 58 percent to $112,349 in 2015 from $71,217 in 2010. A cowboy’s average total compensation rose 13 percent to $49,468 in 2015 from $43,777 just five years prior.

So to recap some of the bad, agricultural hiring news: A pen rider-cowboy’s pay isn’t great. The hours are long and irregular. And you’re outside in the dead of winter and summer.

“You have to love it,” said Andrew, chief operations officer of Quantified Ag, who grew up around ag. “And there’s not enough young people that love it.”

U.S. beef production is also being handled by a gradually smaller pool of family-run operations. In 2012, 80 percent of cattle feedlots were family or individually operated, a 6 percent dip from 86 percent in 2007, according to the Census of Agriculture. While some feedlots are massive with a capacity for thousands of head of cattle, the operations are still multi-generational family businesses at its core. Corporations accounted for 9 percent of feedlots in 2012, up from 5 percent in 2007.

This collision of fewer multi-generational families running feedlots and aging agriculture workforce says a lot about what you need to know about food production in America. Global populations and food demand will only rise in the coming decades. So how do you keep pace as food producers are getting older and broadly thinning out in America? You can push for scale through technology and automation.

How to fix an age-old cowboy dilemma

After hearing the author of “The Medici Effect” speak in Lincoln and getting positive feedback from his DEAL lab work, Vishal explored what he might create as an entrepreneur. He talked to a lot of ag people. A common problem: cattle and animal health.

A feedlot with a capacity of about 10,000 can lose around $750,000 a year to undetected sick animals. (A feedlot usually houses 2 times to 2.5 times its capacity in number of cattle over a year.) And a 10,000-capacity feedyard is smallish. Some of America’s largest feedlots can exceed 600,000 in capacity. "Just imagine how much money they lose every year?" Vishal says. "It's a big deal." He drove around the state and attended talks. He visited feedyards and watched pen riders ride out and visually scan animals for illness. Often preyed upon by other animals, cows through evolution can hide illness that makes a pen rider’s job even harder. Cattle are basically trying to suppress what they don’t want humans to see. As Vishal saw things, “It seemed like a basic conflict of interest.”

Vishal brainstormed how technology might intervene. He canvassed industries—computer graphics, photography, drones. He mashed them up in his mind, broke them apart and tried new potential combinations. His goal was solving a problem that had eluded cowboys and beef producers for more than a century. And just like that, Vishal stepped into his intersection.

He initially envisioned macro thermal imaging of cattle. But that route couldn’t detail individual animals. Plus, photographs offer only a snapshot in time. What pen riders value is detailed, real-time data on animals’ temperature and physical movements in relation to other animals nearby.

Andrew and Vishal at Quantified Ag's headquarters in Lincoln.

Vishal hung around more ag people and swung by more feedyards. He studied pen riders’ workflows. Drive up to feedlot. Check on animals. Prepare food for cattle. Identify and tag cattle ears with numbered, plastic tags. Ear tags, ear tags … hold on. Why not add another ear tag that could read the animal’s ear canal temperature, and monitor head movements that often telegraph when an animal is healthy or sick? “In the beef industry, they’re already used to using an ear tag,” Vishal said. “Why make them change the way they do things?”

A biometric ear tag with a sensor could transmit real time animal information to a database that feedyard managers could monitor—everything from individual cattle movements to larger pen patterns. Humans are already exposed to biometrics, the measurement and analysis of physical and behavioral characteristics, through wearable health sensors. Vishal and Andrew were basically hacking a FitBit for cattle.

Tucked into the ear canal, the ear tag equipped with a sensor can monitor the health of individual cattle and a herd.

The two aren’t the first guys trying to address this cowboy-cattle problem. Researchers have tried sticking sensors inside feed bunks, where animals eat. They’ve perched guys high inside sky boxes to observe cattle from different angles. But the ear tag solution can offer a continuous stream of real-time data on hundreds of animals across vast stretches of land. And all that animal data is valuable as machine learning, a subfield of computer science and artificial intelligence, allows computer systems to learn from and make decisions—in this case, on animal care—based on large volumes of data.

The potential holy grail here isn’t just about spotting sick cattle. It's about possibly detecting illness in advance and opening the door into preventative medicine. “The goal for collecting that data is detecting illness early on, and also to detect it more accurately,” Vishal said. This combination of biometrics and data analysis potentially unlocks veterinarians’ ability to diagnose and treat animals remotely using telecommunications technology—a field called telemedicine that largely has been dominated by human health applications.

Using biometric ear tags, a veterinarian can pull data from a feedlot and zero in on flagged sick animals. And before even driving up to the feedyard, a veterinarian can have some ideas for treatment. Right now animal care is based on word-of-mouth accounts of illness and veterinarians showing up cold to a feedyard.

“You don’t have to literally be right in the field with the animals to detect illness,” Vishal said. “It creates the stepping stone for the telemedicine model.”

In 2014, Vishal and Andrew launched their startup Quantified Ag that’s based on the University of Lincoln-Nebraska campus. They’ve invested in research and development and are leading various clinical trials, and trials in production feedlots. They’re working toward commercial launch of the ear tags.

Prologue: Chasing proteins and career serendipity

All this talk of identifying sick animals remotely sounds appealing. But if you’re an old-school pen rider, you’re likely just thinking about job security. A common worry is whether technology will eliminate pen rider positions. “Some of these old-school cowboys, their biggest fear is, ‘Will this will take my job?’ " said veterinarian Thomson, who agreed to help Vishal and Andrew after getting pitched on the ear tag. Experienced pen riders acquire a gut a feel for their animals. Cattle learn to trust skilled cowboys and in turn are more willing to let their illnesses be revealed to humans.

“If you can find a robot that can read a cow, call me,” says Landon Riley, head cowboy at the Midwest Feeding Co. in Milford, outside Lincoln.

Landon Riley grew up around farming and has been a pen rider for 15 years.

No one expects all cowboy-pen rider jobs to evaporate. What does seem possible with more technology and automation are fewer human jobs aided by machines. Driverless cars could deliver food and supplies to feedlots and farms. Food and supplements could be mixed by machines. If any country is ahead of America in embracing ag technology, it’s Australia. The country has fewer agricultural workers than the U.S. yet feeds more people. Technologists there are testing prototypes like robotic arms with soft grippers that scan and pick fruit off trees.

There are other questions. Will emerging solutions encourage overprescribing of antibiotics and medicine compared to human pen riders? On the flip side, there could be benefits to creating a fully traceable beef and food supply through data. Imagine a kind of food source road map that could help U.S. producers meet global food guidelines and expand in markets like China. But automation and the relentless push to scale appear unstoppable in part because agriculture has become such a small margin business.

Food production and food costs have become efficient that roughly 15 percent of an American’s paycheck goes to feeding themselves, compared to 30 to 40 percent of wages a generation ago. “The issue we’re facing here in the United States is that we’ve done such a good job at providing cheap food, partially through government programs, partially through technological innovation,” Andrew said.

Morning at the Midwest Feeding Co. in Milford, Nebraska.

There’s a saying in agriculture. Generations ago, if you worked hard, you could produce crop and turn a profit. Next generation said if you worked hard and made smart management decisions, you’d do alright. Now if you manage well and you’re a great marketer, you can maybe eek out a profit.

“For my generation it’s going to be fully embracing technology and some automation to coincide with still working hard and marketing well,” Andrew said. “Technology is going to open new markets to us like China, like Europe.”

For U.S. food producers, technology including biometric ear tags could help reduce health-related costs and grow new food markets. The U.S. has some 5 percent of the world’s people, and feeds 25 percent of the world’s population. America’s agricultural industry is a vast machine with no signs of slowing as the world population is forecast to grow by 3.9 billion in some 80 years, according to United Nation forecasts. 

While just 5 percent of the world’s people, the U.S. feeds 25 percent of the world’s population.

And data shows calorie and protein intakes compared to a generation ago are only rising. Global food production will need to increase 70 percent by 2050 to sustain a world population expected to grow to 10 billion. This is the arena Andrew and Vishal have chosen to tackle. Growing food demand has pushed other startups to explore plant-based sources of protein as well as lab-grown meat, seafood substitutes and insect proteins. For now though, meat is still king.

It’s a hot, midday in July and Vishal and I are driving outside Lincoln in his Jeep. We drive past a giant, plastic alligator floating in a shallow ditch of water. He laughs out loud. “That’s so funny!” I didn’t think it was super funny. But Vishal is such a positive guy. He’s infectious and I laugh because I want to laugh with him. No one could have scripted the son of a teacher and Methodist minister, originally from India, would end up in Lincoln and help create something similar to a FitBit for cattle. “I moved from one country to another. You meld the two together, and you find something in between,” he said. “I went through just following the things I found interesting.” When he did leave his full-time job at the university to launch Quantified Ag, Vishal said right away it felt right. He just had one question. “Why didn’t I do this sooner?”

Video directed by Scott Erickson, produced by Heesun Wee, filmed by Dathan Graham, edited by Chris Chan Lee.

This article is part of Work in Progress, a new series exploring what it means to earn a living today. Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Google Play and see more stories at #WorkInProgress.