Ag Tech

AgTech success story as Optiweigh delivers 1000th in-paddock weighing unit

Eric Barker 30/01/2025

Ian McCamley with his new gold painted Optiweigh, which is the 1000th unit.

ONE of Australia’s agtech success stories has crossed a significant milestone, with the delivery of the 1000th Optiweigh unit to one of the company’s early adopters.

The unit was fitted with a gold painted door and delivered to Ian and Kate McCamley of Lowesby station, near Rolleston in Central Queensland. The McCamleys played a significant role in commercialising the weighing units, working with the company’s founder and Northern New South Wales producers Bill and Jacqui Mitchell.

Launched in 2019, Optiweigh is a portable weighing unit, which works by luring cattle over to a lick attractant, scanning an ear tag and sending the weight back to the Optiweigh cloud, accessible with a computer or phone. Mr Mitchell said the Optiweigh has now weighed 870,000 animals, which had returned about 23.5m records

Mr McCamley said the Optiweigh had revolutionised the family business, which primarily backgrounds cattle for feedlots and finishes some grass certified ox. He said he had been looking for more regular measures of weight trends for years.

New England producer and Optiweigh founder Bill Mitchell.

“We had to yard them to weigh them, which has an effect on their weight every time you do it,” he said.

“We looked at the walk over weighing, which wasn’t practical on our operation.

“I remember talking to Bill about his in-paddock weighing idea beside the pool at our daughters’ school swimming carnival and thinking ‘this is going to be gold if it works’.”

Developing from the early years

Mr Mitchell sent one of the early Optiweigh prototypes to the McCamley’s property to test it out – as one of a handful across Australia. Mr McCamley said it has been amazing to see how much the machines have developed since the trial days.

“The machine didn’t even have wheels, you had to take a tractor out to move the bloody thing,” he said.

“We used to have to go out into the paddock with a memory stick, download the data off the machine, bring it back to the office and send it out to Bill.”

These days the Optiweigh is fitted with wheels, it is delivered as an entire unit and is set up to feed data back to any device through the cloud.

“A real key part of the revolution is the dashboard, it interrogates all the weights and shows all the weight groupings in bar graphs,” Mr McCamley said.

“So, if you are trying to target a certain weight feeder market than you watch the bell curve of the bar graphs and how it moves overtime. It gives a really accurate prediction of the numbers that are ready to go, which makes forward booking simple. You can take them out to a paddock to look at how all the weights are going, then move it onto the next one. You can also see when the cattle are starting to pull up in dry times.

“Hitting the sweet spot of weights in your turn-off is where the real value is.”

A true early adopter

Mr Mitchell said the McCamley’s were true early adopters of the software, which is why he was keen to see the family have the 1000th unit.

“Ian could see that if it did what it was purported to do there was real value to his business,” he said.

“He was prepared to pay for units early on, which from a business point of view was a huge bonus to us.

“We wanted to do something special for 1000, so we put some gold paint on the door, rather than silver and set it aside for the McCamley’s.

“It is just a real example of an agtech company finding a true early adopter and realising what that can do when you are trying to innovate and make a product.”

Discovering the power of the data

The Mitchells developed the Optiweigh to make their own operation more efficient by automating the process of weighing to better manage the exits of sale cattle going out on a grassfed supermarket contract.

The idea was to spend less time in the yards weighing cattle, while keeping a good handle on how much they weigh – needing to balance accuracy and practicality.

Figuring it was easier to only get two feet on the scales, rather than four, Mr Mitchell came up with an algorithm to determine the entire liveweight of the animal by only weighing the front legs.

While proving the concept on his own property, he was keen to see how it would work in other systems before commercialising the product – which is where the McCamley’s came into play.

Mr Mitchell said the data was showing many additional benefits to the original aim of saving time.

“Ian found he was more accurately able to meet feedlot specs, he could take cattle to a higher weight without going overweight and deliver in a narrower range,” he said.

“People are now using it as a decision-making tool for a whole bunch of things like nutrition, animal health and grazing management. Those realisations about the power of the data have led to word of mouth spreading, which I think is why we have been able to develop the company.”

Potential to collect more data

Mr McCamley and Mr Mitchell agree that there is more potential to measure other traits through the unit, like fat cover and emissions. The company has a partnership with Agscent working on emissions measurement.

Mr Mitchell said the company was working to develop its exports.

“We are having to do the hard yards in all the other countries, like we have in Australia,” he said.

“We have a representative in Uruguay, who is importing our products and selling them. We have about 20 units between Canada and United States. And we are working with a young couple to handle import and sales in the United Kingdom, where we have a couple of units.

“It is early days overseas and we are trying to establish use cases with people like the McCamley’s who really are early adopters.”

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Comments

  1. Greg Brown, 30/01/2025

    An excellent story with a very practical tool for two very practical people

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