Smartbow GmbH -Zoetis
With SMARTBOW from Zoetis, the world`s leading animal health company, you and your vet have 24/7 access to individual real-time information about every cow. The intelligent SMARTBOW ear tag monitors the rumination behavior as well as the activity of each cow and sends notifications about health and heat behavior. This allows animal health problems on your dairy farm to be prevented, detected and treated, which ultimately leads to better results.
Company details
Find locations served, office locations
- Business Type:
- Software vendor
- Industry Type:
- Livestock
- Market Focus:
- Globally (various continents)
About us
2009 – the virtual currency Bitcoin was born and Slumdog Millionaire won 8 Oscars. At the same time Wolfgang Auer decided in the Upper Austrian Weibern to turn the idea for an animal localization system into practice and get down to work with his software engineers. In 2008 he has won for this innovation the golden medal at Eurotier and want to be active as an entrepreneur.
The main idea behind SMARTBOW was to know, what happens to the animals, without being in the barn constantly. 'Farmers should work efficient and with less time assumption to rise the operating result’, so the founder. Based on his own agricultural farm and the experience as product developer at an international company for stable equipment and feeding systems, Wolfgang Auer was sensitized and saw the potential for a localization system for animals.
As part-time farmer with 30 cows he has the problem that he doesn´t know what happened in the barn and was looking for a system urgently, to monitor his animals while working in the office. He was confronted in his job to look for single animals in big sow herds, which were housed in groups. This was extremely tediously.
The first prototypes of the Eartag up to the series maturity product were developed and tested in cooperation with a testing center in Germany – first at breeding sows. The housing could be tested here under particular harsh stable conditions trough his pace. The primar test installation was in 2010. The cooperation allowed to eliminate system failures and to perfect it.
But SMARTBOW, as the name says, stretches an intelligent bow over the whole farm, not only localization inside the barn with the Eartag is possible, as well activity and rumination can be measured. Dairy cows build therefore manifold opportunities, why the R&D is concentrating to this sector. The ready for market solution SMARTBOW can localize cows in barns, detects heat and monitor rumination behavior. Further products are in process of planning.
Meanwhile 35 employees are working at the company in R&D, production and sales of SMARTBOW. The development is very close to the customer, to justify the solution to their needs. The simple operation and installation are central.