Ranchbot, an Australian company that expanded to the U.S. a handful of years ago, creates products that allow ranchers and farmers to remotely monitor their water resources, like if a trough is running low or overflowing miles away.
Ranchbot’s sensors use satellite technology to monitor tank levels, trends and operation, and customers can check data on their phones or computers in real time. In the last few years, the company has expanded its products and capabilities to what customers said was important, including being able to remotely turn pumps on or off.
Water is top of mind for many Texans as the state is trying to avoid a looming crisis driven by a sizzling economy and mass migration.
Last year, lawmakers and voters passed historic funding for infrastructure, and officials are putting together an updated 50-year plan. And while North Texas is typically wetter than other parts of the state, recent maps show drought conditions in several areas including South and West Texas — and even counties bordering Oklahoma.
For Ranchbot CEO and co-founder Andrew Coppin, it’s about helping ranchers be more efficient, but also about helping them collect information.
“We need data,” Coppin said. “You can go ask any rancher how much of anything they’ve got: how many cows, how much gas, how much feed, and they’ll tell you everything. Ask them how much water they’ve got and they’ll answer enough or not enough.”
Considering a cow can drink an average of 38 gallons of water a day and there are tens of millions of cows in America, Coppin said the industry is using billions of gallons of water a day to grow milk and beef.
“We’re talking about the No. 1 input into the business and no one really knows or can quantify exactly what the number is,” he said.
A ‘history of ranching’
Before spending 25 years in corporate finance traveling the world, and working in places like New York and Hong Kong, Coppin grew up spending time on his dad’s ranching and farming operations in Australia.
He said he remembers watching John Wayne and old western movies depicting everything happening between Fort Worth and Kingsville.
“The history of ranching — all the heritage and culture — is here,” Coppin said, sitting in his Fort Worth office that overlooks the city skyline and Trinity River. “That’s really important because I’m a rancher now technologist and it’s critical to me that we respect the culture of ranching whilst we help it evolve.”
He said ranchers can be resistant to change, but it’s ultimately necessary in order to stay competitive.
“Every business on the planet is making better informed decisions based on data,” Coppin said. “Ranching and farming should be no different but if you don’t have the information how can you make better decisions? You can still overlay ranch intuition but you can’t make it with no data.”
Coppin said there are “innovators are early adopters” already using Ranchbot, but he hopes the product becomes more mainstream in the next 2-3 years. Producers are looking at factors like cost of labor combined with the time and material costs of driving around to check wells or troughs — areas where Ranchbot might be able to lend an assist.
The company’s entry-level products start at about $600, and increase to roughly $1,600. There’s also communication cost that averages out to about $1 a day to operate.
When choosing Fort Worth for Ranchbot’s U.S. headquarters, Coppin said accessibility to travel was important, since the company is caring for ranches from Montana to Florida.
But more importantly, he said, he wanted to be close to all of the universities across Texas that are “teaching the ranchers of tomorrow.”
“The reality is they’re all here,” Coppin said. “I realized the importance of and criticality of universities in the whole evolution of innovation and ecosystem. They all have a really, really big influence and are a benchmark of where innovation comes from.”
‘Texas and beyond’
Texas A&M University’s AgriLife announced a collaboration with Ranchbot in December to promote and develop innovative satellite-connected agricultural monitoring systems.
“The collaboration aims to develop technologies that improve water, livestock and land management outcomes for producers in Texas and beyond,” officials wrote in the announcement. “The agreement outlines shared goals of research, teaching and extension activities that show the benefits of using remote infrastructure monitoring and data-driven insights in modern ranching and agricultural production systems.”
Texas A&M’s AgriLife’s McGregor Research Station, about 115 miles south of Dallas-Fort Worth, is more than 6,300 acres.
The property runs about 1,000 breeding female cows and a few dozen herd bulls, a feed yard facility and individual feed intake facility. Staff also farms about 1,500 acres of row crop, like corn and sorghum sudan, and small grains, like wheat and oats.
“We are very unique in size and scope from what we’re able to do from a research standpoint and also from a ‘One Health’ standpoint,” Ryon Walker, operations manager of the center, said. “We have the capabilities of doing projects that start from the ground all the way to the consumer.”
Walker, who has been working on the station in McGregor for more than four years, said staff previously was able to monitor water, but had to be on site. Now, they can pull up water levels for troughs on their phones.
He said being able to monitor water remotely has been helpful to operations.
“We’re not West Texas but we’re large enough where it does take time and effort to go and check [the troughs].”
Blair Fannin, communications and media relations manager with Texas A&M AgriLife, said the research team’s goal is to help ranchers and farmers.
“We’re in this to enhance the productivity and profitability of ranchers and efficiently utilize and natural resources and water,” Fannin said. “We’re always looking for ways to improve.”
In the last decade or so, Ranchbot’s operations expanded from just Coppin and his co-founder Craig Hendricks to 100 employees. About 30 of those are in the U.S. and Coppin said he hopes to double that amount this year, mostly in Fort Worth but throughout the country.
“I get out of bed everyday for our customers,” Coppin said. “It’s great to build a business but the bigger reward for me is that we’re delivering for people that really never get a very good deal. They don’t get a lot of things run their way so when I know we give them time and money and peace of mind ... it’s an insane level of satisfaction in my mind.”
Right now, the technology is on about 12,000 ranches combined between the U.S. and Australia, Coppin said, but he hopes to not only get on more ranches but to make generational impact.
“I’m living in a world where I think I’m building technology for my ranchers’ kids’ kids,” Coppin said.
This reporting is part of the Future of North Texas, a community-funded journalism initiative supported by the Commit Partnership, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, the Dallas Mavericks, the Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Lisa and Charles Siegel, the McCune-Losinger Family Fund, The Meadows Foundation, the Perot Foundation, the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas and the University of Texas at Dallas. The News retains full editorial control of this coverage.
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