What started out as a hobby for two brothers has evolved into an award-winning product that allows ranchers to monitor livestock water remotely.
Katlin Lang is CEO of FarmSimple, a company he runs with his brother, Dustin, at Vibank, Sask. Together they sell a product known as Herd Hand, which monitors remote watering systems. Herd Hand won an Innovation Award at Ag in Motion this summer.
A request from a friend spurred the Lang brothers to create Herd Hand.
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“So one of my friends was going to the lake for three weeks, he was going camping, and he said, ‘Can you build us something that will send me a text message if my water gets low? Because I’m going to the lake, and I would rather just relax on vacation and not come home.’ So that was his angle on it,” says Lang, adding that the prototype they built for their friend has been running since 2018.
[AUDIO] Canadian Cattlemen editor Lisa Guenther talks with Katlin Lang about livestock water monitoring.
The Herd Hand monitors water levels and sends a message via text if water levels are getting low. FarmSimple also offers the Herd Hand DT (Dual Temperature), which also alerts the producer when the internal temperatures of the bowl begin to drop to critical levels.
“Inside the black box is a monitoring system, it runs off of cellular signal,” Lang says. “So what we tell customers is, if you have at least one bar signal on your phone, and you might send a text message through here and there, that’s going to be enough for the monitor to connect. Phones are very data-hungry, they need a lot of data to operate, but our system uses a small amount of data.”
When the Herd Hand is wired to a solar pumping system, it can also detect the battery voltage, Lang says. The Herd Hand also has Wi-Fi capability; however, Lang says they steer producers away from that, and instead, promote using cell service.
“Sometimes the password or the Wi-Fi name changes, things go offline, and then nobody knows what’s going to happen.” He adds that they still charge those connecting with Wi-Fi $10 a month to cover the data going through their cloud and ongoing support services.
A Herd Hand and a Herd Hand DV each cost $649 to buy, plus a monthly subscription fee to send messages from the device to a cell phone, which is $9.99.
Lang says if producers aren’t convinced, they can go to the calculator on the FarmSimple website, which calculates how much producers will save by using their products. According to their website, if a producer’s watering bowl is 50 km away and it takes two-and-a-half hours to check water (including travel time), and they take five trips per week and value their time at $45 per hour, the producer would spend $43,044 a year, $3,587 a month, and $896.75 a week (if fuel costs $2.05/L).
With a Herd Hand, Lang says producers can save most of this money by not travelling to their watering bowl as often.
Travis Peardon, a livestock and feed extension specialist with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture, presented a variety of different new technologies in the livestock sector while at Ag in Motion, including FarmSimple. While presenting, Peardon revealed that he uses the Herd Hand on his operation, complete with a solar panel.
Peardon rates FarmSimple’s customer support as excellent. “I had a few issues getting mine going and I talked to Katlin on the phone, and basically, 10 minutes later it was up and running.”
Because Peardon works for the ministry alongside running his operation, the Herd Hand works well for his needs.
“It takes about five minutes for a text to come to your phone once it detects that the water level is low. But definitely a game-changer for anybody that’s busy or working.”
The Herd Hand was built to be deployed within North America. Currently, FarmSimple has customers in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
