By Owen Roberts
The year is 1955, and thanks to research, grain yields are starting to rise. At a feed mill in Winterset, Iowa – birthplace of iconic actor John Wayne – Robert Allen is trying to figure out the growing inventory in his various grain storage bins.
His approach is the industry standard. Sometimes, he’ll climb a tall ladder and peer into the dark bin through a hole in the top, trying to determine the grain level’s depth. Other times, he’ll rap his knuckles or a mallet on the side of the bin and listen intently for a slight ping or a tell-tale thud, then make an educated guess about the level.
And while neither approach is very accurate, Robert and his team at the mill must use this best-guess method to determine what bins they’ll tap to move feed – the most vital, most expensive part of a livestock operation – to their anxiously awaiting customers, who are likewise unclear about how much inventory they have in their own bins.
Agricultural technology has surely moved forward in the past 70 years. Yet manual practices continue dominating feed bin inventory management. Robert’s grandson Ben Allen, now an active participant in the feed industry, is concerned that most aspects of even the most modern feed operation have changed very little. For example:
- Feed mill operators are still doing visual or audible checks, guessing at levels and when they should change over their mill from one feed or ingredient to another.
- Schedulers are still trying or figure out how much inventory their customers need, based on assumptions and returns.
- And livestock producers are still hoping their feed mill will be adequately stocked and able to meet their needs.
At some level, most everyone in the feed chain is wringing their hands at the archaic situation, hoping they or the next person they’re dealing with will guess right. You can tell when they don’t: Mill operators panic to make sure they have enough feed to fill orders, producers place “just in case” orders before weekends and holidays so they don’t run out, and trucks stream from feed mill to farms to reclaim precautionary feed orders that went unused.
If you think this sounds off-kilter for a foundational, $588.5-billion industry like feed that underpins the entire North America livestock sector, you’re right.
But with Ben Allen’s guidance, change has finally arrived.
Ben is CEO of BinSentry, an ag tech company founded in 2017 in Kitchener, ON, to take the guesswork out of feed bin inventory and feed delivery. The technology uses sensors placed inside bins to accurately assess the inventory in real time (every four hours), as well as something called predictive AI to anticipate how much feed a customer needs, and when, based on that customer’s track record.
This coordinated data stream reduces mill changeovers and emergency deliveries, both of which drive up operating costs, lessen efficiency and affect the all-important feed conversion ratio (FCR).
“Traditional grain inventory management is like driving your car without a fuel gauge, never really knowing how much gas you have in the tank,” he says. “You’d always be stopping to top up, worried you’d run out and wondering where you’d find the next gas station. BinSentry eliminates that kind of guesswork.”
Agriculture runs deep with the Allens. In the family commodity trading business, Ben raised more than $1 million in venture capital funding to create a contract farming offering, ultimately becoming one of the largest grain-producing operations in the US. He joined BinSentry after a successful run as head of global market development at Indigo Ag, an ag tech startup that he helped grow from $300M in 2017 to $3B in 2021.
Today, BinSentry is installing 2,500-3,000 sensors every month on poultry and swine operations and feed mills in the US, Canada and Brazil.
“My passion for this technology is driven by how many people we can help,” Allen says. “I wanted to build a product that offers a real solution to a big problem. And with feed accounting for 70 per cent of the cost of raising livestock, this technology can be a big help.”
Owen Roberts is a past president of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists.