Guelph’s Be Seen Be Safe Ltd. is helping prevent disease outbreaks through data monitoring

Oct 10, 2017

The mobile app can record and analyze data movement between farm properties

By Diego Flammini
News Reporter
Farms.com

An animal health company from Guelph, Ont. is using mobile data technology to help prevent and livestock disease outbreaks before they happen.

Be Seen Be Safe Ltd. uses satellite technology to create virtual boundaries called geofences, around farms and other agribusinesses.

When any vehicle passes in and out of the boundary, the property owner’s is notified by a mobile application. The system then automatically creates a record of all registered visitors to the property.

“Since animals do not move themselves and are transported from location to location, we essentially just track the vehicle,” Tim Nelson, president and CEO of Be Seen Be Safe, told Farms.com today. “We don’t trace individual animals because that type of information is generally on the drivers’ manifests.”

Be Seen Be Safe received investment funding from the provincial government in 2013. The company also received funding in 2016 through a seed fund by Bioenterprise Corporation, a leading agri-technology business accelerator. Since then, the company won an Ontario Agri-Food Innovations Award in 2016 and increased the number of properties on its system from about 100 in Ontario to 2,000 across Canada, the United States, Australia and the European Union.

The company is now adding to its application network to give farmers and transporters more information to use in the fight against livestock diseases.

“We’re working to include wind and weather patterns in our analyses,” Nelson said. “We’re looking at including wild bird movements, which is crucial for the poultry industry, especially when it comes to avian influenza.

“We also have a new device called Farm Health Monitor. It monitors and reports clinical signs of disease at the farm so that we can get in front of potential outbreaks before they get out of hand.”

The program is very simple to use. All anyone has to do is download the app, and the Be Seen Be Safe network takes care of the rest, according to Nelson.

And in an industry where technology is becoming more sophisticated, simplicity can go a long way.

“Getting people to adopt any kind of technology can sometimes be a hurdle, but all users need to do is download the app and fill in their details,” Nelson said.

Top photo: Tim Nelson/Canadian Poultry Mag

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