Ever.Ag Accelerates Growth, Broadens On-Farm Dairy Solutions with Acquisition of Cainthus

Jun 28, 2022

a leading agtech provider dedicated to empowering supply chains to feed a growing world, has acquired Cainthus, a company that offers artificial intelligence- enabled cameras for analyzing dairy operations. The addition of Cainthus to the Ever.Ag portfolio will provide dairy farmers and their advisors new insights from passive data collection.

"As part of our agtech vision, we are excited to add virtual eyes on the farm, Cainthus, to our portfolio," said Ever.Ag CEO Scott Sexton. "We believe precision agriculture, now in the dairy barn, is the future. We are committed to growing, expanding, and embedding Cainthus technology into our software suite that spans the supply chain."

The acquisition of Cainthus delivers on Ever.Ag's mission and continues its decades-long tradition of partnering with the dairy industry from farm to fork. Additionally, as consumers become more focused on purchasing environmentally friendly and sustainably produced goods, the data it collects can validate responsible farming practices throughout the supply chain. The information from Cainthus is invaluable to upstream affiliates and downstream consumers.

"At Ever.Ag, we continue to invest in the dairy industry as we've done for several decades, and Cainthus offers multiple benefits for our producer clients," said Mike Borman, Ever.Ag Chief Product Officer. "We look forward to continuing to develop its cost-saving, quality-enhancing capabilities for farmers, cooperatives, processors, and their partners."

Following the Cainthus acquisition, Ever.Ag plans to enhance the offerings of its My Dairy Dashboard product and producer portals ― which integrates data from milk pickups, feed delivered, recorded cow events, milk schedules, and pay information. Cainthus will use the operational data to associate and visually validate herd performance in the barn.

Both Ever.Ag and Cainthus are leaders in data digitization for dairy farm operations and their animals. Ever.Ag solutions are designed, developed, and produced by a global team with a passion for agtech, client sustainability, and mutual prosperity.

"Mobile cow-side data entry revolutionized the industry a decade ago, but it only digitized work, it did not reduce it," said Ryne Braun, Segment Leader at Ever.Ag. "Cameras from Cainthus, mounted in your barns, provide passive collection of herd health and feed consumption data -- that's literally a gift from above. Cainthus is very innovative technology for farmers who are willing to "look up" to improve their operations."

The Ever.Ag team is comprised of over 500 agtech professionals from around the world. With headquarters in Texas, and satellite offices or hubs in Wisconsin, Illinois, Tennessee, Ireland, India, and Canada, Ever.Ag is well positioned to serve a global client base.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”