Startup JetBov, which created a management platform for cattle ranching, intends to carry out a new round of investments in the coming months, in which it will seek resources for its expansion. Today, approximately 2,500 farms, with 5 million animals, are registered on the company’s management platform. In addition to Brazil, which concentrates the largest volume of customers, the agtech also operates in Angola, Bolivia, Mozambique and Paraguay.

JetBov’s wants to double its turnover in 2021, as it happened in the last three years, according to the CEO, Xisto Alves de Souza (the company did not disclose its revenue). The company’s growth rate is in line with an industry trend: the capture and interpretation of livestock data to increase production rates and ensure the sustainability of the business, the so-called ‘Livestock 4.0’. According to a study by the Centro de Inteligência da Carne Bovina (CiCarne), an intelligence center on beef cattle, at the sector dedicated to the subject at Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), if the level of management and technology in the segment does not change, more than half of the farmers in activity will leave the field by 2040 due to lack of profitability.

According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), 1.5 million rural producers left the activity between 2006 and 2017, due to problems with profitability and low retention of young people. Cattle breeder Murilo Trindade, 32 years old, from Aquidauana (Mato Grosso do Sul), almost entered the IBGE statistics. The cattle breeding tradition, which began with his great-great-grandfather, at the time of the city’s foundation, became an unprofitable source of “savings” due to the management model. So much so that, on the advice of his own father, he decided to move to São Paulo, in 2004, to study.

However, in mid-2014, he began to realize how much money they were losing. The three family farms added up to 2,100 hectares, but they did not yield a beffiting profit. “If we sold everything and put the money in a savings account, the income would be higher”, he says. It was then that the producer began a movement of transformation, which would culminate in him leaving his profession as a civil engineer, in 2018, and returning to Mato Grosso do Sul.

With a lot of knowledge of project and people management, Mr. Trindade created a company, FitAgro, with shares divided between himself, his brother and his parents. “We started to do business management, with cash flow. We integrated the family and changed the mentality”, he says.

In November 2018, Mr. Trindade became a client of JetBov, which was born after business manager Xisto Alves de Souza realized the difficulty that cattle breeders in Lages (Santa Catarina), where relatives of his wife lived, had to collect and analyze data manually. In 2016, after talking to breeders around the country, he launched the company.

According to Mr. Trindade, the platform has been speeding up the work. Each animal has device in an earring read by an electronic stick that connects to the corral scales. It only takes one click for the data to be sent to the cloud, to be viewed by the producer, on a computer at the property’s headquarters. The facility gives the possibility of making decisions almost in real time.

Another platform functionality is the control of pastures. In it, the producer can design the area to be used by the cattle, enter information and understand the production capacity, according to JetBov marketing manager Thiago Bernardon. Mr. Trindade states that this is important because grass needs to be seen as a crop similar to corn and soybeans, which has a time to grow and be harvested, so as not to lose its nutritional value.

In three years, the new management model resulted in a 50% increase in the Trindade family herd, which reached 1,500 cattle, in addition to several investments in the structure of the farms.

For Livestock 4.0 to be implemented, producers will need resources. For this reason, the agtech recently announced a partnership with credit startup E-ctare, which will provide credit with better conditions for JetBov customers who, in addition to using the platform in property management, adopt best practices.

“Many times the cattle breeder wants to increase production in the same area, but doesn’t have the capital to buy cattle. So, this model allows producers who are more mature to have a competitive credit line”, he emphasizes. “It transforms cattle into financeable assets, digitally it becomes a Rural Producer Bill (CPR)”.

Source: Valor international

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