Bill sits down with Rick Dumm DVM, a veterinarian, entrepreneur, and industry innovator in animal health and agricultural technology. With over 30 years of experience in veterinary medicine, Dr. Rick shares his journey from dairy veterinary practice to launching groundbreaking solutions that transformed animal health practices. He discusses the challenges of introducing new products to niche markets, the role of veterinarians in driving adoption, and how digital tools and AI are shaping the future of the industry. Whether you're in agriculture, animal health, or simply B2B marketing, this episode provides valuable insights into scaling innovations in specialized markets.
Dr. Rick is a large animal veterinarian with a long career that has coupled day-to-day practice with product development for the dairy industry. He has successfully exited several business ventures throughout his career and today is the head of Datag Inc. This technology company is focused on leveraging AI and large language models to fill the void created by a shortage of veterinarians and the growing demands of the pet industry.
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Dr. Rick: So there was no Facebook. There was no, you know, Hey, let me just roll out some Tik Tok videos and we're going to go sell some product here. But. So, and it was brand new and it required science. But we had to, we went to the equipment guys first. Unfortunately, they couldn't really explain why a guy would need it because, what are you talking about? We've never done that. Dad didn't do it. Grandpap didn't do it. Why would I do that? So, well, okay, we'll turn to the veterinarians, right? They can explain the science. Well, I would say this for anybody out there looking at trying to develop a product. You know, you develop your list of pros and cons and you try to be honest about, these are the cons, but in reality, you've already convinced yourself, this is the next sliced bread. There's no way this could fail. Well, I completely underestimated the fact that, you know, I assumed every other veterinarian colleague of mine would also say, yes, that's brilliant. Why haven't we been doing that? They did not say that. They also said, well, you voodoo, whatever, why would we do that? We've never done that. Right. And it took 10 years to convince the veterinary community. So you just don't know what kind of hurdles you'll run into.
Intro
Bill: Thanks for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Today I have a very special guest with me, Dr. Richard Dumm. Dr. Rick, how are you doing today?
Dr. Rick: I'm doing well, thanks.
Bill: So Dr. Rick, you have an extensive background in launching companies in the animal health and agricultural field. You're a veterinarian. Maybe give us a little bit of a background about your experience and how you came from the lowly hills of Pennsylvania to where you are today.
Dr. Rick: Well, that was not an easy escape route. I can tell you, once, once you're a Pennsyltuckian you’re always a Pennsyltuckian. So, I, I did, I grew up back there in the, the hills around the Johnstown, Indiana area and, frankly loved it and enjoy going back all the time. But it was, other other challenges were beckoning, as they say. So went to Florida for college, and, managed to make it through vet school down there at the University of Florida. So, give, gave the Gators a few bucks back in the day when they had a good football team. But, you know, it's, it, yeah, it's, it's been great. I've practiced as a predominantly large animal, dairy veterinarian for the last 30 years. So it's been a fantastic career. And as we'll jump in here and talk a little bit about, but lots of interesting challenges and opportunities that that those little three letters at the end of, you know, when you have the name Dumm, you, got to put doctor in front of it, right? Or, or or you can't leave your hometown. So that's how it goes.
Bill: That's, that's so great. I love that. Well, Dr. Rick, one of the things like that I've found fascinating about your career is there are a lot of medical practitioners, whether it's, you know, MDs or veterinarians that practice all of their lives and do just that. They practice, they have patients, they build their own local practice and are very successful and fulfilled in that. You not only did that, you found ways to invent or innovate and then not only come up with those ideas, but then take those ideas to market in building companies. Could you maybe talk about, you know, kind of those two sides of your career, that of a practicing veterinarian, but then also an entrepreneur and a business owner who took, you know, found problems, develop, which we all find problems, but then you correspondingly developed some solutions, right? And then not only found those solutions, but then we're able to scale those, take those to market and that whole approach. Could you maybe walk us through some of those?
Dr. Rick: Sure. You know, it's, as you mentioned, we all, we all get exposed to issues or weaknesses in whatever our chosen field is. And I think part of it is I grew up, you know, again, back there where, where everybody just worked hard, right? And so you, and, and I think we were good problem solvers maybe. And that's probably also growing up on a farm and in the timber business and everything else, right? And back in the day, you know, when there wasn't always a technical solution for everything. So you just kind of plowed through it with hard work. But what I started to notice in my career as a dairy practitioner was there were a lot of things that were gobbling up our time every day and also gobbling up, draining the energy from people. And as a caregiver, I'm often charged with working with the herdsmen or the calf raisers or whatever on these dairies. And that's not easy when animals are sick all the time. It's hard enough to just get through the day-to-day things that need to be done, the feeding and the milking and the bedding and the manure handling and forget about all the office things that have to happen to make it happen. So I think I just have a frame of mind for that. And I love to invent and I love to go home and figure out what is the solution. So I think the two go hand in a hand. But, but I think that, you either have that in you or not to say, I think I can solve that problem. Right. And, now maybe it takes a whole other, set of, blind skills or ignorant bliss or something to think I can now take this idea, now I can take my solution and go market with that. Yeah. That's a whole other ball of wax.
Bill: Well I think when you look at some of the things you said there, whenever you're, so I own a farm and there's never a worse call from the farm other than like, the calf barn, there's a problem. And it's in like, oh, there's 20 calves right now on bottle and seven of them are sick all of sudden. You have a problem. And the emotional toil that that that causes on top of, like you said, all of the work that goes into the agricultural community to make things work. It's rough. I know you did some innovating in that space and certainly came up with some solutions with pasteurization of calf milk that changed the industry, certainly. And then not only did you come up with that situation, you guys took that to market and really grew that business. Could you talk a little bit about that calf pasteurization and that process and the company and just maybe a snapshot of that life cycle of that company?
Dr. Rick: Yeah, you bet. It was exactly that. You you get the phone call of, you know, and it happened to be a dairy, probably one of the top Jersey herds in the country. I mean, the two owners were both so into genetics and it was just an amazing group of cows that milked, even volume wise, they milked as well as Holsteins. It was unbelievable. They were big, beautiful cattle. And yeah, hey, we've got calves dying. You know, that's not a herd that you can just, well, I don't know. Let's throw this antibiotic at them or that one. So we, anyway, long story short, when you test for everything, you find everything on a dairy. And so, right. Well, that didn't do us any good. Yeah. We know there's salmonella okay. Is that the problem? We know there's, so you've run down through the whole list and, I don't even know what, the aha moment that I had, you know, it's been long enough ago that maybe I forget it, but we just suddenly asked, well, could we be feeding the problem? Is, are we doing this? And why don't we pasteurize the milk that we feed these guys? We pasteurize them up before we drink it. And so that was the moment, right? And nobody, of course, was doing that back then. This is in 1999 and there was nobody pasteurizing. I found a little bit of research. Some guys had looked at it out at UC Davis, but to my knowledge, it was never on a farm. So anyway, said, how hard can that be? We'll just heat up milk, right? It's 25 years later, we're still learning how to heat up milk. So, but it's, it was, it was amazing within, within a week of, you know, I built this contraption is literally what it was. It looked like a whiskey still right on the, you know, we told the milkers look when this big red light comes on, run over there quick and open this valve and close that valve. And, but within a week, we had literally turned things around on this farm to the point where, and it was such a drastic transition that I realized, okay, this is something I can do to help all of my clients, maybe more than my clients, right? You know, I wasn't quite thinking, oh, we'll sell this in 35 countries. It was, what can I do within my practice and make myself more useful than giving shots? And so, you know, that's really the company in a nutshell. And about 10 years later, we started looking at colostrum and realizing, hey, this is another big weak spot and we have the same pathogens in there. How can we carefully pasteurize that and protect it? And, you know, that required a lot of research, a lot of cooperating with universities all around the country to make sure we're doing things right. You know, it is nice again with my degree, I have access to all these people, know, they'll actually take my call and the first one anyways, but then they, you know, we go from there and we built it up and it's been fantastic. So over the years we've somewhere in the range of 25 to 30 million calves and have literally had an impact on an industry. So it's been. It's been fantastic.
Bill: Well, no, that's wonderful. And congratulations on your success there. And thank you to someone who enjoys dairy products and has a dairy farm. Thank you for your innovation in that space because we, you know, one of the other points, and we're not going to spend a lot of time on this because this isn't really, here in my level of expertise, but there are so few people growing up at the farm anymore. And there are so few people that actually know where their food comes from and how hard it is to raise these animals, to raise these crops to feed the world and how much actually goes into it. So that's such an important piece of our economy and the world ecosystem or whatever you want to call it. But no, that's so important and those type of innovations. And to take an invention and an innovation and then make a worldwide impact. I mean, everybody has that dream in their career when they're starting out. So that's amazing that you accomplished that. One of the things that's interesting when you think about entrepreneurship and marketing and innovating and growing a product is you have to think about what the market is for that product or service. And certainly in the agricultural space, in the animal health space, there is such a limited niche market for anything that we do. And also it appears to be growing smaller and smaller every day. Can you maybe talk about some of the challenges, maybe not so much with that product, because obviously at 35 countries, 35 million calves, like you found something that hit the rocket ship and took off, right? But when you've thought of other inventions and those type of things where you've seen that challenge of marketability in the animal health space, especially at scale, what are some of the challenges that you've assessed or seen when you've tried to market ideas?
Dr. Rick: You know, my wife is a CPA and was our CFO and I don't believe rocket ship has ever been a word that she's used to describe our business.
Bill: Fair, fair.
Dr. Rick: This is going to be awesome in 25 years. So anyway, no, it's absolutely a consideration. Again, when you're, I have the fortune, the fortunate case of being ignorant to just not realize how challenging it was going to be. So you're in a industry, specifically the dairy industry, right, even at that time, in the 1900s and early 2000s, we had, I don't know, 55,000 dairies. Maybe 60,000 dairies in the US. Now, fast forward 25 years, we're down. I would be surprised if there's 35,000 viable dairies, right? There may be a few more with a milk cow or two, but, so yeah, you know, and you compare that to, so even if, you know, think about that. I have a product and I think I can make a hundred dollars profit every time I go sell it. If you sold every one of those, which would take a long time to nurture and build up, I mean, it's a three and a half million dollar absolute glass ceiling for you. Right. So it's, it's, and it's, it's only going to cost you 4 million to do it. So you should be good, but it's, it's tough. You compare that to, uh, you know, um, a household product and you know, where you may have access to 132 million households in the United States. It's a big challenge. See, you absolutely have to take that into consideration. And then, then, you know, when you compare those two ratios, right? Of this is a little tiny number of dairies and then this is the number of households. How am I even going to go talk to those people? They're so spread out across an enormous country, right? You know, any company of any size will, will tell you, know, they need, I don't know, minimum 15, 20 salespeople to try to cover the United States. Well, how do you pay those people? And, and, and, know, how are you going to go touch these dairies and actually be part of, uh, be part of their story or, or get into that inner circle and try to convince them to buy something. So it, all of these, all of these things come into play here. And, you know, even in the much broader beef sector where you have, uh, yep 750,000 now that that's a huge number compared to dairies. First of all, these guys don't even want you on their property. A lot of them. And the same thing. They are so spread out. How, do you go talk to them? And how do you, how do you find them and make them aware of a product that you have? And especially if it's a new, novel product, it's a big challenge. But you can even take it back a step further that how do I even find funding? Because now not only is it a small niche market, but now you have a small, a very small group of investors who can understand what you're doing and want to invest in it. That's a big problem. You got to either have a whole lot of wealthy friends and family. I'll repeat where I grew up. I did not have that. And you know, that's tough, right? Or you have to have enough wealth of your own to get a bank to back you up, or you have to really learn to be a great salesman right out of the gate to go sell an idea before it's even a product so you can get investors and… most of us, you know, most entrepreneurs are not great salesmen. They're, they're, so that's tough. How do I go find funding? You know, and, and in, in our world, then it makes me nervous of entrepreneurs that are really good salesmen. That's the, that's the thrannos of the world, right? That, they actually did not have that.
Bill: Yeah, they were really good at the sizzle and there was no steak. Whenever you guys were taking that company to market and growing and you were really pushing the pasteurization methods for cattle, what did you find was the most successful marketing techniques with all of those challenges you listed? Was there something that stuck out that worked really well or something that failed miserably that you could talk about? Because we end up getting, I think, more than our fair share of inquiries from animal health and or agricultural companies for marketing, if for no other reason than our background with John Deere, our background in agriculture, because so many, there are very few marketing companies that actually understand the ag world. They don't, kids aren't on the farm. I mean, they're really good at Facebook and these, you know, these younger people that are probably way better than me at clicking on things and understanding the algorithms of stuff, but they have no idea which end of the cow you feed and which end the other stuff comes out of. So what do you see that has worked really well in the animal health space for getting those touch points, nurturing those audiences and getting adoption or at least maybe recognition of the authority of a product?
Dr. Rick: Well, it's, it's tough. And, you know, I'm looking back now at a spectrum of, of 25, 30 years here, but you know, like for my company, for the dairy tech products, those, that was brand new and it was science. And, you know, we tried going to the market and this is in the day, right, this is before social media. Right. I mean, I mean, when I first started practicing, I was still stopping and putting quarters in to call back to answer when my beeper went off. Right. And I know I look young and spry, but that was, you know, it was, that was, that was the day. Right. So there was no Facebook. There was no, you know, Hey, let me just roll out some Tik Tok videos and we're going to go sell some product here. But. So, and it was brand new and it required science. But we had to, we went to the equipment guys first and, and you know, back then, and they still do, but these guys were the only ones that had route trucks driving all over the country and they're fixing equipment and they're visiting dairies and they were happy to take on a product. Unfortunately, they couldn't really explain why a guy would need it because, what are you talking about? We've never done that. Dad didn't do it. Grandpap didn't do it. Why would I do that? So, well, okay, we'll turn to the veterinarians, right? They can explain the science. Well, I would say this for anybody out there looking at trying to develop a product. You know, you develop your list of pros and cons and you try to be honest about, these are the cons, but in reality, you've already convinced yourself, this is the next sliced bread. There's no way this could fail. Well, I completely underestimated the fact that, you know, I assumed every other veterinarian colleague of mine would also say, yes, that's brilliant. Why haven't we been doing that? They did not say that. They also said, well, you voodoo, whatever, why would we do that? We've never done that. Right. And it took 10 years to convince the veterinary community. So you just don't know what kind of hurdles you'll run into. And then, but the veterinarians ultimately helped us grow the company. These guys, once we could prove it to them and there was science behind it. Now they helped us get onto their farms, but then that plateaus because they're not salesmen. They can show up at their dairy and they can say, you got a calf problem, this'll help, but they're not going to go find you another client that they don't work for. So, so we plateaued, but by then now you have some market saturation and you have more and more stories out there in the literature. So now we could move into distribution and then resume our climb with our business because it's a product that can be distributed now versus you have to educate about it all first. So that's been the difference. But I still think those things are important. Having some research behind you or having the relationships with the universities, having people write stories about what you're doing and how it's working and how it's been successful, right? And you know, that it's not cheap even, you know, look at our publications in the dairy industry, right? The Hordes Dairy Minute, it's 10 or $12,000 to put an ad in there. You can go through your budget pretty quick and you better be good at writing ad content. So we're fortunate now to have social media as an opportunity. And now with our new products and projects that we're working on through Datag and even still with DairyTech. That's more of our focus of how do we go communicate with these folks because we're into that generation now where those are also people running the farms and they're paying attention to that stuff.
Bill: But I think that's right on. I mean, and it shocks me what's still missing in a lot of animal health and agricultural marketing is social media. And companies are not leveraging that tool. They're not leveraging video. They're not developing content that makes sense for the market because you just described, I think what's very classic in this hyper niche market. You have multiple stakeholders. You were going through distribution. So you had to educate your distributors. You then had to educate your end users and you were doing that kind of via proxy with the veterinarian community. So there's a lot of different like minds on that quote unquote buyers committee or those stakeholders that you're trying to educate and bring along. back in the day, back in the payphone day, right? That was a lot of hard work. It's still hard work, but you can do that work once and then scale it through video, through social media, through case studies, through those type of applications and then repeat, rinse and repeat and continue to have those touch points over time through social media, through YouTube, even TikTok or wherever the channel may be. So I think that's an interesting take. And I think that that takes us really into our next topic because not only did you see your career impact the dairy community, and which is more of a B2B space, right? Very niche audience. Very defined total addressable market and probably revenue potential that you approached with that slow rocket ship as your wife would probably call it now if we could get that label in there we'll hope but the, you know, now you're looking and developing, which I want to take some time to talk about something that is more applicable to consumers in every household in America. And I think it touches on two points. One, I think one of the things that would be a very risky proposition would be to try and get veterinarians to take the time to communicate about new products and services to their clientele because the veterinarians I'm exposed to are so busy and so overworked that it's more treat them and street them than it is having the time that the veterinarians did on our farm 15 years ago to actually have a cup of coffee after the herd check and have a conversation. I mean, they're in, they do their thing and they're gone. And it's not because they're rude or impersonal, it's that they are so overworked and so under resourced. So I think that that's a challenge for the animal health space moving forward, especially when we're using veterinarians to educate the farmer or the producer. But Dr. Rick, let's talk about that veterinary shortage and the new innovation you're approaching to address that not so much on the agricultural or production animal side, but more in the companion animal side.
Dr. Rick: Yeah, it's interesting, you know, it's estimated that the shortage right now is about 15,000 veterinarians, right? In, the United States. So, but I, I was watching a presentation the other day and got a little education for myself there too. And, and it was really a, oh yeah, that's, that is true. These guys were talking about the fact that the shortage isn't even the biggest problem we have. And even if the schools were suddenly to crank out those 15,000 vets next year, we would still have a big problem. And that is we're not productive. We're not as productive as we used to be. And I'll go ahead and pat myself on the back, but I was probably an idiot, right? I didn't, we just grew up that way that, well, you you're going to have to work 80 or 100 hours and that's just how it's going to be. You're not hiring vets anymore that will do that. And even in livestock, even in rural veterinarians, they they're choosing lifestyle. And maybe they should, maybe, maybe we were all foolish. I don't know. I mean, you if you end up looking like me, if you work 80 hours a week, so I don't blame them.
Bill: Well, Dr. Rick, for someone who's only 39 years old, I will say that you like you've been ridden hard, I would say, for those 39 years.
Dr. Rick: You know, it's hard to look like a baseball glove that's been left out in the back porch for four years. So, yeah. No, we, but, these vets, you're right. They, they're, coming out of school. They want higher wages. They, they want to work less than 40 hours a week. They don't want to do emergency on call. They don't want to work weekends. And, and, and I'm not even, I'm not even picking on them again, right? It may, may be that they're smarter for actually having a life and that's great. However, now somebody has to own this veterinary practice and that's a business, right? And the business has to make money and I can only charge so much. Now we're really in a pinch on the livestock side of things because the cow is only worth so much. And you know, on the beef side, even more so, that, she may be worth this much this year. Next year don't even think about charging me that because I can't afford to pay it. We're better off to go some other direction. So, you know, and as you work through, you know now the horses well, you know. They're worth a little bit more to me, but you get to companion animals and and yes, they're worth quite a bit but folks don't have an unlimited amount of cash resources to take care of them, so that's our that's our problem, right and so we, these veterinarians have to find ways to be more productive with their practices because hiring more vets is not the solution. And it's interesting, you know, here in Colorado, and I'm not even saying I'm a fan of it and I'll come right out and say I voted against it, but this proposition, I think it was 129 or something and it got approved by the voters. But you know, now they're going to essentially allow physician assistant type of roles in veterinary medicine. And so it'll be this mid-level practitioner and that will, you know, they're, of course the push behind it was that'll make it cheaper for you to go to the vet. Well, no, it won't. The person that owns the practice and now a lot of them are corporate, you know, they're, they still have to have a profitable business. But now they can pay that person a little bit less. That's true. And, and maybe they can crank a few more cases through their clinic. So somehow in this whole story, we have to find more productivity. And so that segues into a lot of what we're trying to do with Datag of in developing animal tech talk, for example, is a large language model built and designed to speak with you about your pet at a veterinary level. And we really tried to take the training wheels off this thing and it, you know, it's scary, but we're there and society is there right now to trust. I don't want to say trust information. None of us know what to trust there, but I can at least trust in the fact that if this model has read every journal, every textbook, every case study from every location around the world of how veterinarians have handled this problem, that thing is smarter than Dr. Dumm, every day, all day. And I've got, I can think of one or two colleagues that would say, no, it's never smarter than me. But the rest of us probably would acknowledge that, okay, so here's some technology that we need to adopt, right? And if it can help, and the veterinarians that I speak with, if you can handle all of the questions that I have to answer all day long that I can't charge the person for anyway, and help them be smarter, help them be more comfortable with being a pet parent. And not even on the, you know, pet side necessarily, but even look at cattle, you know, can I have the confidence to go down there and get an idea of what's going on with my herd without waiting three days for a veterinarian to get me onto their schedule to come out? And I don't have very good shoe. And my rope broke last time we tried to use it with the tractor. I mean, you know, we can, technology can step in here and do a lot. Now it can't put its hands on an animal. It can't write a prescription. It can't do surgery. Right. I mean, so veterinarians are not afraid of that upending their livelihood. I think it's the type of assistance that we need in the industry and it makes people more productive. Now I know I need to go there because they've already asked 17 questions. Oh and by the way, when I show up, it can give me that case report of what's this guy been talking about for a week and I can get it in a very succinct case brief. And I know exactly what I got to deal with when I get to this guy's farm or when that dog or cat does come into my clinic, I've got it all. So we're excited about that. And I think when we talk about the veterinary shortage and we talk about the rising costs of veterinary care, it's scary. And you combine that with the fact that so many people are, a lot of people are choosing to have a pet in lieu of children. These are their children. But it's gotta be, we have to do everything we can to make that affordable because you want people to be able to take care of them as best they can.
50 Marketing Break
Bill: I think when you look at the efficiency that you're driving, to be able to, in the palm of your hand, in these smartphones, to be able to interact with this language model that can provide feedback and kind of narrow down what's going on so that then when we are communicating with the veterinarian, it's succinct, it's as accurate as it can be from an owner standpoint, right? They certainly don't have medical training, they don't have the tools, et cetera, the diagnostics, but at least narrow it down. It seems to me that we could create tremendous efficiency and maybe deal with some of that gap that's caused with the napkin math of 15,000 vets. But then when we actually probably do the hours needed, you know, there's a whole other figure there because of the productivity loss. And I agree with you. I think when you look at generations gone by, young people who are graduating from university right now, no matter what position they're going into, they're getting jobs for 30. Like they get a job that right out of college that says you only have to work 37 hours a week. To me, that's laughable because I was excited that I didn't have to go into consulting when I came out. So I was planning on 65 to 70 hours a week instead of like going to work for one of the big consulting agencies that they told you you were going to work 80 to 95 hours a week. That's what it was for two or three years. So, but that that world is over. And I don't think it's ever coming back. And whether it's in the veterinarian space, business consulting, I think even the hospitals are starting to struggle with that because they can't get these interns to work 200 hours a week or whatever the crazy math is and live at the hospital and do that. So well, when you think about this pivot in your career, right? Moving from more of that direct to farm in the animal community, you're now on the face and like right on the horizon of dealing with a direct to consumer product and how does, service, however you want to look at it. So how do you feel like in your strategy, you're kind of approaching that marketing space differently?
Dr. Rick: You know, it's really an interesting challenge. And you know, when you got gray hair, right, that's your indicator that you're not the best guy to figure out your own marketing plan anymore because we didn't grow up with these apps. We didn't grow up doing that stuff. It just didn't exist. And thank God, right, I’d have never gotten married if all a girl had to do is swipe her finger and he’s off the list, you know? And so here we go. And you really have to avail yourself to people that understand how that, how social media works. What does it take? And the attention span of course, right, is gone. So we used to think let's put an ad out or let's put an article out and let's try to get them to read the first paragraph or let's have them look at an ad and you know, we got their attention for five or six seconds. You've got about one and maybe even less than a second now. And that's, I'm not even exaggerating. I mean, that's literally what it is. And if you don't grab their attention somehow, some way within that second, they're onto the next thing. And that's almost all of the platforms. And so, yeah, that's our challenge now. So it's a whole new set of challenges for a guy like me. But you just have to avail yourself to people that are in that world and can figure it out. It is interesting and I like it. These influencers, right? What a crazy concept or notion. You know, we had influencers growing up, right? We had old Mr. Kirsch that lived over there that seemed to know everything. And, you know, he didn't have a degree in anything, but I don't know. What does Mr. Kirsch think? Go ask him. You know, but… It's so wild to think now that these people that are out there and have built up a little bit of a following and some of them are quite intelligent and good at what they do. Some have, they're not, right? I mean, they have no intellect, but for whatever reason they have the right look or they have the dog that they make fun of or whatever and now they're an influencer or even their dog is an influencer, right? We have animals that are influencers. So it's all quite insane. However, it's where we are and it's not gonna go away. And so learning how to play in that field, but I wanna embrace it because I do think it's interesting that people are talking to each other and sharing experiences and learning from each other in ways that we never had available to us. You know, I equate a lot of this to, you know, like animal tech talk that we're working on. You know, when we all had started having babies 25, 30 years ago, everybody went out and bought the book, you know, what to do, What to Expect When You're Expecting. There was nobody, we had already kicked grandma out of the households. Right. Because that used to be everybody's book. She was the influencer. That's why you let your grandma live with you until she was gone. Right. And now we had to buy books and now it's switching to influencers and apps. so I think it's cool. It's scary and it can be difficult to understand, but we're learning.
Bill: I think definitely for animal tech talk and that app, the path is, it's TikTok, it's influencers, it's right on the edge of D to C. I would be shocked if there were many techniques that worked historically in animal health. Hordes Derriman article that is TLDR, too long didn't read. It would take a minute and a half, two minutes to just get the gist of the thesis statement and the features and benefits. That's all gone. That's ancient history. It's right out on the edge. So I think that's exciting and it's interesting. Doctor, do you want to talk at all about beyond the animal tech talk and kind of that interface with health conversation? Do you want to take any time and talk about the facial recognition of and using AI to identify animals. Do you want to talk about that innovation that you're working on?
Dr. Rick: Yeah, and I one of the things that we face as an industry in ag, especially, but there's applications everywhere. But biosecurity across the globe is huge, right? That's going to be one of our biggest challenges up and coming. I, you know, knock on wood, we're so lucky to have dodged some bullets here in the last couple of decades in this country with diseases that have wiped out entire industries in entire countries around the world. And, you know, we're experiencing that a little bit right now with HPAI, you know, with bird flu.
Bill: Yes, the egg crisis, right?
Dr. Rick And people are, you know, I mean, I hope they recognize the eggs are expensive because there's no eggs because they killed all the birds, right?
Bill: 100 million, I've heard 100 million birds, they killed.
Dr. Rick: That was a solution, right? I don't even, it's not that I disagree with it or anything. That's what they had to do because you can't have a diseased flock, right? Even if some of them would have survived, they don't come back to productivity. Anyway, as that transferred into dairy cattle, we got a good taste of it in the dairy industry. Okay, well, how bad is this going to affect cattle? Fortunately, it's not killing cows, but it does knock down milk production and it does create some problems. But anyway, I think biosecurity is going to continue to be one of our biggest challenges on the horizon. And you know, we trade our beef and dairy and pork and poultry products all around the world. And those products are coming here to, well, we still don't have a very good way of identifying animals and really tracking them. And so facial recognition will be that. I mean, right now, the closest technology we have with any chance of working a little bit is RFID, the microchips. But that's a 45-year-old technology. And we've been able to prove with horses that we can do facial recognition. And that's been really cool project to work on. And so we literally can go out and with a, you know, a one and a half second video, recognize who these horses are. And I went out and tested it actually, you know, out by meeker with the wild horses that are out there. And, know, there there's a fantastic example of a technology, right. And how do we use it? these are, they all look like they were 30, but they were probably 60-ish year old women that are literally volunteers. And they go out and they try to identify all of these wild horses and they spend hours in the field and they take a gazillion pictures and they learn the horses. How do you pass that on to the next person? Because they need to know who the horse is though. And that mare comes in to drink at the water trough that the... has put out there, they dart her with some contraceptive to prevent her from getting pregnant. Well, we can't dart the same horse every week, you know, but by the time they figure out which horse it is or agree on it and they're down in a blind, you know, it's like, so we went out and took this technology out and we're taking pictures of horses from a hundred yards away with a cell phone. Well, that's Shadowland, isn't it? That is Shadowland. How do you know that? Let's get this one, right? Because they had already given me their pictures and they said, okay, we know who these horses are and we train the computer. Right, well, the computer trains itself. And it's really cool technology. So now we take that and extrapolate that into knowing the cattle, knowing the pigs. You know, it's, there's a big opportunity there to, to solve an enormous problem, for our country and to give us all frankly, just a little more confidence in food safety and the whole system. And, you know, we could sit here and talk about, dozens of applications for that technology. For the horses, we're using it as a, an event management tool. So that, Hey, I want to, I'm going to come to this event this weekend, or in a couple of weeks, I'm going to just register for that. And okay. I'm taking chub and ham bone down to that roping and boom, they've, they've got my paperwork. It can all be checked in advance, but, when I show up, they take a snapshot of chub and ham bone and they're verified. And there's no question about it. And now, you know, next week when they realize, oh gosh, you know, one of the horses at that event had West Nile virus. Boom, with a click of a button, they can tell everybody. Or they know what other events have you been to now? And pretty soon the spiderweb becomes manageable. Right now it's really tough. It's really tough. We get these cases of BSE and other stuff and it's, know, my hat's off to these veterinarians that track that stuff down because that can't be easy.
Bill: Sure. It's a lot of work.
Dr. Rick: Oh it's really tough. So I'm super excited about what we can do with that. And of course, pet owners out there, you know, about eight to 10% of pets are microchipped. And about 45% of those actually completed the registration. So that if their animal does get found, they know who to come in contact and say, hey, we found your dog. But a guy's got to have the scanner. So your pet has to be found by somebody that doesn't just decide, well, I just got a new dog. He's cool. But he takes him to a vet clinic or he takes it to a shelter that has a scanner that can scan the chip and the registration was done. And then hopefully everybody gets reunited and it's a, it's a happy story. But with facial recognition, you have a scanner in your back pocket. Everybody does. So when that cat comes in your yard, you don't have to try to catch it. If it's missing and it's been reported missing, take a picture of it and it's going to put the two together, right? And we'll figure it out. So it's super cool. All this stuff we're working with now in these large language models. It's really been a lot of fun and an interesting segue away from, you know, I've been working with widgets all my life, physical implements that you go and market. And this will be, this will really help you do your job. And so to get into this type of technology, it's a lot of fun and I suspect it's going to also be fulfilling and rewarding here ultimately.
Bill: Well, Doctor, I think one of the things I hear with this facial recognition is the chip was the solution that wasn't true. Because if you have an adoption of like you're saying less than 4% of actual use and utility in the market, the chipping works as long as you have a hundred percent adoption and you have scanners everywhere and that type of, but that's never going to happen because the cost, I mean, I don't even know if anybody's figured it out. It’d be astronomical and unworkable. So here we're taking, the problem remains the same. The solution that was proposed and implemented was not a solution because it didn't work and it didn't, it wasn't adopted. Here we have a solution that we're leveraging tools that are available to everyone. I mean, my children have phones for criminy’s sake with like, so, everybody on the planet pretty much has a phone with a camera. So. The this this development, I think, is just so right for the age and is really going to have massive impact. Well, Dr. Rick, I find these subjects completely fascinating. I grew up on a farm. Still own a farm. I dabble in agriculture, certainly not the scale of some of these farms that you've represented over time, but I still enjoy participating as a hobby and thinking about the convergence of animal health, agriculture, pet ownership and technology is just, I could listen to you talk about these things and some of these applications all day. I just find it fascinating.
Dr. Rick: It's fun to learn. Sure.
Bill: But yeah, and it's neat to learn about these things. And then I look at it from my perspective, which is, okay, how do we take these things to market? How do we make sure that there's a quicker adoption? Because like you said before, you can't spend 4 million to get it to market if the total revenue opportunities 3.5, because then your wife, the CFO is talking to you and saying, tapping on his shoulder like, hmm, let's have a little gut check, right? I've been there.
Dr. Rick: She's swiping left. Or right out of the widget is, but you're gone.
Bill: Yes. Love it. Yeah, don't, that's, yeah. Thankfully, I dated before technology, right? So I don't know about that either. I had a friend who was divorced and he told me about re-entering the dating scene here in the past 10 years and said it was a complete disaster. Like just the amount of technology involved to date was just ridiculous. And thank God I was not able to participate in any of that. [a]
Well, one of the things we love to do here, Dr. Rick, is we love shameless plugs. So we would like you to tell us, and we'll have all of this connected to everywhere we post this, social media, YouTube, everywhere, your contact digits and all of those things will be available. But just maybe tell us a little bit about your companies, where they can get ahold of you, and if anybody's interested in talking further about these topics, how they can reach you.
Dr. Rick: Well, great. I appreciate that opportunity to do that. Datag Inc. is our parent company. We spelt it like a hillbilly would, guess. It's D-A-T-A-G. So, you know, we didn't want to put that extra A in there and just have a company for us. So dataginc.com and, but, EQUID is the horse facial recognition technology, but all of that can be found at the Data Ag website. But no, we welcome any and all conversations about applications, about folks in the industry that would like to pursue, hey, gosh, wouldn't that also do this for us? Let's talk about it. And we're really enjoying this because there's not a conversation we have. They never, they never stay on track. We're always, what about this? And so it's so much fun. And to be completely shameless, if you're interested in investing and being part of what we do, please feel free to, to reach out and, contact information is there on the website and, and my email is just [email protected]. You don't even have to call me doctor. I’ll take your call.
Bill: Well, yeah, and I've enjoyed, so you and I've had other conversations on other channels with other people about some of these projects. And I've absolutely enjoyed the conversations and what we've been trying to accomplish. And certainly I agree with you. Whenever we get into these rooms and we're having these conversations, we start down one path. And before you know it, there's these other. So I think the reality is the opportunities here are really infinite. And that's the promise of this next technological revolution and it's finding ways and addressing real problems. And I think certainly when we think about veterinary shortages, when we think about biosecurity, when we think about, information and knowledge being transferred and being able to deal with, information that will not be available if it isn't cataloged properly. There are a lot of ways that we can see this convergence of technology and the animal health and agricultural space and even for pet owners come together and see real true innovation that's going to have lasting impact. So it's an exciting space to be in.
Dr. Rick: No, absolutely. No, I agree. And the way people want to digest information, the way they want to have access to it now has changed dramatically. And the way that they want products delivered to them now, right? You know, our farm's no different than our home now to where if I need a vaccine because I'm working calves tomorrow, I'd kind of like it to be here by tomorrow morning. And so we have this new expectation. So there's a lot of changes coming even in the ag sector that we all need to be ready for. And AI is going to be a big part of that. So it's very interesting and rewarding to be in this new space now. Not that I miss being shoulder deep in the back end of a cow for a living. I mean that was also glorious. I'm just saying this might be better.
Bill: So the funny thing about this conversation up to this point is that most everybody who listens would understand, like who isn't from the ag space would understand a lot of what we talked about or generally. This part, we're gonna go completely off the rails. I always found the consistent dad joke or bad joke that is always occurring during preg checks is the… I broke the seal. Because as soon as you start into that, the gas that comes out that the environmentalists are after, the methane that just pours out of that cow. And then every vet in my lifetime has always been like, yeah, I broke the seal. And then anyway, no, that's good stuff. I think that also speaks to, I mean, even as we embrace technology, those of us who love agriculture and love animals, we always still love to deal with those animals where they exist. There is no technological innovation that is going to replace us growing animals for food and growing crops. There's nothing. So we have to deal with that. That's part of our future and we have to innovate. But yeah, when you think about coming from small farms in Pennsylvania to where you've gone, there's still that element that we have to deal with that in some days are we're shoulder deep in a cows behind and dealing with all that. I love it. Real quick personal story. I was going to pursue veterinary medicine. Grew up, our vet had to deal with a number of twisted gut in our herd. And I assisted on several surgeries when I was a kid, just knee high and I was in love with it, in love with it. But then I met chemistry, chemistry and I, we dated, but ultimately chemistry swiped the negative direction on the app. And at the same time, coincidentally, you know my dad was an entrepreneur and a business owner. And then I ultimately fell more in love with pursuing that space and following him because he was my hero, still is, and pursuing that. Dr. Rick, love this conversation. Definitely as a personal favor, when you're back in town visiting the family, we have to get together and have some lunch or breakfast or whatever. Looking forward to that because us Pennsyltuckians got to stick together.
Dr. Rick: That's right.
Bill: And, but no, thank you so much for joining us and we're to run this back again, cause I'm going to want to get an update here six months a year to see how much progress and how far this app and everything is going in your business.
Dr. Rick: That sounds great. I look forward to it. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
Bill: Thank you. Well, thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing, B2B, animal health and agricultural marketing. Like, share, subscribe. Have a great day.