While the U.S. beef industry is the largest in the world, the majority of the farmers are only working part-time on their cattle production. In Kentucky, the leading beef producing state east of the Mississippi River, there are more than 30,000 cattle farms and an average herd size of 27 head. Most of those farms are family-owned, according to the Kentucky Cattlemen's Association.

"80 percent of the cattlemen in our system receive most of their income from off-farm activities. So we have a lot of part-time farmers. They're trying to be efficient, they're trying to make money, they're trying to add income to their homes, and so forth but there's a time limitation, and there's a distance between them and efficient learning," explained Dr. Les Anderson, extension professor at the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment in the Department of Animal and Food Sciences.

In his career as an extension agent, Dr. Anderson found that traditional ways of supplying important educational information to cattle farmers were inefficient for a variety of reasons—it can be difficult for farmers to get to extension offices and the internet can be spotty or nonexistent in rural areas of the state.

Kentucky farmers aren't alone in these issues. Dr. Anderson's friend and colleague Dr. Justin Rhinehart, an associate professor and extension beef cattle specialist at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, saw similar troubles in the Volunteer State. Knowing that the cattlemen wanted to make their farms more efficient, the two educators teamed up to help. About six years ago, they launched a pilot program focusing on extension education, which became the building blocks of their app called X10D.

"We chose normal-size farms of beef cattle producers in the state of Kentucky and we directly demonstrated to them how to apply proven modern production practices," Dr. Anderson said of the pilot program.

"What we're able to find out is if we provide information in a reliable fashion and we give them some trust in that information, we can make pretty significant income changes to those farms and actually hit our peak. We had 147 farms in the program, and the average increase in revenue was 34 percent. We were able to identify inefficiencies and personally provide information to help them."

While the results were impressive, the work of physically going from farm to farm was taxing on their small staff. One of the other major time-consuming issues identified was data collection by the farmers, as many were keeping almost no records.

"When I went on these farms for my first farm visit to help them to understand their production situation. I would spend one or two whole days, digging through everything that they've done so that we could get an understanding of where they were in the production situation," Dr. Anderson said.

This is where their X10D app, with its farm management data collecting capabilities, comes in handy. But to work well with scattered internet access and a farmer's busy schedule, the team wanted the app to be quick, simple, and cost-effective.

"Based upon our current plan (for X10D), all they have to do now is click a button to share with me, and I have access to all the records and so then I can go through and we can very quickly identify inefficiencies," Dr. Anderson said.

The X10D app is designed to collect and manage farm data—including data on cattle plus forage information. Available on a mobile or web interface, users will be able to submit their data within five or six-button pushes, which includes turning on the phone and tapping the app button.

Another element of the X10D app is a learn component featuring high-quality educational information.

"The learning component is our goal is to give (farmers) access to unbiased, research-based information that they can trust. They don't have to go to 50 different sources, they don't have to go through 500 different YouTube videos. They can come directly to extension, which is the last bastion of unbiased information in agriculture," Dr. Anderson said.

"We believe that if we can combine data collection and management with quality educational content that we can help move that revenue point for most of our producers."

With a beta version of the app currently being tested by two beef producers, the X10D team is eagerly awaiting a soft launch of the app this summer. The soft launch will add a handful of counties in Kentucky and Tennessee, potentially hundreds of users, with the help of the already existing agriculture extension system. The goal is a full launch in the fall of 2021.

The positive feedback they've received from the cattlemen who have seen X10D is fueling excitement for what's to come and what it means for the farmers in the region.

"(The app) decreases the cost of improvement, to make the cost-benefit analysis for a part-time producer beneficial," Dr. Rhinehart said.

"The importance to our individual states and to the region and to the country is huge because beef cattle production is done on a small scale, mostly by part-time producers. So if we have more impetus for improved efficiency and improved revenue generation on the whole, when it aggregates state-wide it's a huge impact to the economy, especially rural economies. And a huge impact across the nation by correlating that cost of improvement. It makes a huge impact, it just keeps scaling up."

By: Erin Shea

Launch Blue nurtures promising startup founders and university innovators through intensive accelerator and incubator programs. Its funding partners are the University of Kentucky: Office of Technology Commercialization, KY Innovation, the U.S. Economic Development Administration, and the National Science Foundation.