Ashley Perepelkin says she was born and raised a city girl, never thinking she’d sell fresh beef from cattle she raised on her own Alberta farm with the help of artificial intelligence.
“I met a boy, and this boy happened to be a farmer,” she says.
Perepelkin, who spent most of her life in Red Deer, Alta., says she and her now-husband Andrew met in 2010, got married and began farming grain together.
When she decided to get cattle, it was a steep learning curve.
“A lot of things were learned, unfortunately, through trial and error,” she says.
Perepelkin says she enrolled in a continuing education course through Olds College of Agriculture and Technology in Olds, Alta. That’s when she saw a video about what AI could do for farmers and became excited.
“Employees are expensive, especially … when you don’t exactly know what you’re looking for at the beginning,” she says.
“It’s hard to train somebody.”
The Perepelkins can monitor their cattle’s health, activity, nutrition and growth though cameras, thanks to facial recognition technology for animals called 360 Live ID, a platform developed by a startup called OneCup AI.
OneCup AI is the creator of Bovine Expert Tracking and Surveillance, or BETSY. CEO Mokah Shmigelsky says the technology has been on the market since 2022, and there are now 140 setups across Canada.
“So far our producers have been very excited about our system, and offering consistent feedback so that we can improve their user experience,” she says.
Shmigelsky, who grew up near Calgary, says her extended family has been involved in ranching and farming for a long time.
She says the idea for BETSY came about when she and her husband were sitting around a campfire at a family reunion in Saskatchewan, discussing the “pain points” in the cattle industry.
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