Performance Livestock Analytics with Kory Lauridsen

In this episode of AK Podcasts, Mike Donaldson and guest Kory Lauridsen from Performance Livestock Analytics discuss the evolution of livestock management, focusing on the importance of data and technology in modern farming. They explore the features and benefits of Performance Beef, a cloud-based software that automates operational records for cattle feeding, health, and financials. The conversation highlights real-time data tracking, success stories from producers, and the integration of financial insights to enhance decision-making in cattle operations. Kory also introduces additional tools like Cattle Krush, which aids in market analysis for cattle purchases. The episode concludes with insights on how technology is transforming the livestock industry and the importance of collaboration between producers and advisors.

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Transcript

Chris Radke (00:00)
Welcome to AK Podcasts, where we explore science and nutrition behind livestock care and management with the best in the brides in the business. I'm your host, Chris Radke, part of the Sales Department here at Agri-King. And with me today is the Director of Field Services, a Member of the Sales Management Team, Mr. Mike Donaldson. Mike, how you doing, buddy?

Mike Donaldson (00:17)
Outstanding, Chris, actually, not hate to timestamp these things too much, because it's important that you always think you're hearing the latest and the greatest. Just finished a great week of fall meetings with the Agri-King team. ⁓ Looking at a really good year, this is going to be fun. think we're at good times.

Chris Radke (00:36)
Yeah, my limited ⁓ connection with all these people, they're always excited about these meetings and just getting together and kind of just bumping ⁓ ideas off each other. So it was pretty neat just to be there for a little bit. So Mike, who are we talking with and what are we talking about today?

Mike Donaldson (00:51)
Well, there was a time Chris, and it really doesn't seem like it was that long ago to me that a lot of farms ran on a record keeping system that consisted of ⁓ two seed corn books in their shirt pocket. One, they wrote the crop information in one. wrote the animal information in, and then they usually had a checkbook and a pen. And that worked for all we were trying to do at the time. have businesses ran and they ran well.

That is not going to suffice today. ⁓ This is maybe the golden age of having information available to us on farms. We've gone way past just needing a sharp pencil. It is amazing to non-farm people the technology that's using to produce their food. People just don't get it. They think that the whole world still runs on an American Gothic model with Ma and Pa on a three-time pitchfork.

For a company like Agri-King that does nutrition work, we can do a much better job for our clients when we have access to a lot of the feed information that can now be easily and well tracked. So on today's podcast, we're joined by a company that is leading the way in providing this information on beef operations across the US, Performing Livestock Analytics.

It has been kind enough. The Director of Strategic Sales is Kory Lauridsen We've got Kory joining us. Please, Kory, tell us a little bit about yourself, some background, what you do for PLA. us the lowdown on who and what you guys are.

Kory Lauridsen (02:35)
Absolutely. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate you guys having me on the podcast today. I've been looking forward to this for some time. I didn't know how much planning goes into these podcasts, but we've been talking since June about this. I'm glad we can get together. Yeah. So as far as my role at PLA, guess a little bit about myself. I live in West Central Iowa on a little acreage outside of Manilla, Iowa. So if anybody's looking at a map or just north of I-80, just south of a little town called Denison, Iowa, have a

fiance and a two and a half year old boy named Kuper few cows ⁓ that we try and do some show cattle stuff with don't judge me for that but we we try and have some fun with few cows in the farm and and raise a little boy to be the best man he can be but ⁓ so at PLA so I'm our Director of Strategic Sales Do a little bit everything I try and be a utility player for our sales team and customer success however, I can help them either that be out in the field or on the

virtual meetups, kind of crazy since 2020 how much more we've done with that. But a lot of virtual meetings work alongside Dane and Dustin. There's our CEO and COO, co-founders of the business, Melissa, my counterpart who had managed the sales team and Bailey managing the customer success team or head of customer success. So trying to do a little bit of everything, but a lot of what I do is working with our partners. So Agri-King being one of those, we've had a lot of fun over the years, Abe and Trevor.

Mike Donaldson (03:37)
Yeah.

Kory Lauridsen (04:01)
and team and Adrian you can go down the list for the Agri-King team so try and work alongside our partners if they need help or they have a customer that's in need of anything I'm there to help along the way and build business and help that independent cattlemen thrive.

Mike Donaldson (04:17)
Could you give us ⁓ a history, ⁓ the story behind PLA, if you could, please?

Kory Lauridsen (04:24)
Absolutely. yeah, something I hold pretty dear to me. You know, it's it's been a long journey here at PLA in our short amount of time. I mean, we've been here for a while, but it seems like it's been short. so January 2017, the company got started. Dane Kuper and Dustin Balsley, like I said before, the co-founders of the business really out of necessity, more or less found.

found a need for a software on farm so both Dane and Dustin have a small operation or small to medium sized feeding

So Dane feeds cattle independently there and

St. Ansgar, Iowa and Dustin with his father Brad and a long time multi-generation farm in Floyd, Iowa, just south of Osage. So about in the same area, know, Dan and Dustin have known each other since school years and worked with each other in the past. And like I say, of necessity, saw that they needed this software and eventually saw that this could actually be a business. You know, there's other independent small to medium sized producers that want this as well. So yeah, so in January 27th,

they got rolling. I got started with the company March of 2018, so I think I was employee number nine or ten or something like that with in the top ten somewhere in there. So we've had a lot of fun along the way. So today, pretty fast growth. mean, considering we've been in business nearly eight years or so, about 4,300 producers on the system. There'll be about 10 million head of cattle that run through our system in a year.

Mike Donaldson (05:36)
Yeah.

Okay.

Kory Lauridsen (05:59)
Probably a little over that this year. So been a been pretty cool to see see it grow and see that journey go on But it's it's been a lot of fun

Mike Donaldson (05:59)
Okay.

Well, I alluded early on to the, you know, how much more information we can get on farms these days. And then you mentioned a couple of our beef consultants that are having really good success with using your program. What are some of the different aspects of Performance Beef? What do you guys, what are you guys bringing to a farm? Maybe dial it the whole way back. If someone's never heard of you, never given any consideration.

to something like what you offer. What is it after you would set a farm up, leave their driveway, what are they left holding in their hands? What are they gonna be using tomorrow?

Kory Lauridsen (06:50)
Yeah, absolutely. yeah, Performance Livestock Analytics being the company, our flagship product is Performance Beef. So a lot of people, you know, that they if they see our company, they probably think our company is just Performance Beef and not PLA. It's a little shorter to say, I guess. But so Performance Beef as our mainstay flagship product. ⁓

So it's a hundred percent cloud-based. we're, you know, at the service, what we're really trying to do is automate those operational records. So feed health and financials. How can we give a better idea of here's how the feeding went today or here's what happened shoot side to those animals, whether you're treating or processing them. ⁓ So we, you know, literally an iPad sitting in a, in a loader tractor and a loader for that producer, a Bluetooth enabled scale head called a point and an iPad sitting in a feed truck.

or a feed wagon ⁓ tracking that feed along the way, you know, so if they are feeding cattle it's tracking that in real time so as soon as they save it on one device they're going to see it on another and so we

Yeah, we try and make that as user friendly as possible. know, our original guinea pig was Brad Bosley, ⁓ Dustin's dad. And for him, that was his main thing was, hey, you know, I don't mind using technology, but it's got to be easy. And so for us, that's always been our, whatever we add into the system, you know, we always want to make sure that it's user friendly, straightforward, something that everybody can use and provide the best value possible for that independent cattleman. So feed health financials, and then we try and track that.

that back into ⁓ closeouts and invoices and analytics and tracking your feed inventory. It's a little bit of everything in there. So that's what's a lot of fun is once you get your basics down, track your feed and track your health information, you're able to get all that back into the system automatically through the cloud. And then we help compile and compose that data in a little bit more reasonable manner so that you can help make decisions in real time. Again, gotta be easy to use.

Mike Donaldson (08:50)
And I've been on a couple of farms. I mean, no secret, I do mostly dairy, but I've been on beef operations and I've always been impressed with how simple it looks like people are feeding with your system. So, so describe what maybe the A to B to C, I'm going out to feed a pen and I've got my iPad, I've got a nice sturdy mount in my loader. So I'm going to load that mixer.

What is coming up? What has been set up ahead of time? How's that experience gonna actually work when I feed a pen of cows?

Kory Lauridsen (09:30)
Sure.

That's a great question, you know, and it's so fun, know, a lot of these producers, you know, I've gotten to set up quite a few of them or visit quite a few of them. it's always so fun to me when their first thing that they say is they'll never feed without Performance Beef, you know, and they are so hard pencil and paper guys and they're like, I'm never going to feed without Performance Beef again. And so from its core there, so as the producer is in their loader tractor and their payloader on the iPad, you know, we're going to have, you know, just no different than their load sheet that they would have.

on paper, we're going to have their load set up for however they're going to feed them today. So they're going to have their load, their pins listed here on a load. And then we're going to have the ration already built in. So it's automatically generating what that ration needs to be based off what their nutritionist balances and how many pounds they need to have in that, in that mixer. So they're going to push load on the iPad. And when that happens, left-hand side is going to show the target for that particular ingredient or the first ingredient they need to feed. Right-hand side going to

their scalehead like normal. What we are eliminating though is that mental math watching the scalehead and knowing when to stop right so the left hand side is counting down that feed ingredient they're watching that so say they're loading corn and they need a thousand pounds as they're dumping corn in the Bluetooth enabled scale heads communicating back to the scale or to the iPad and then they count off that thousand pounds and then if they overload it what the nice part is is typically that was never accounted for right well we always fed everything perfect right how many feet

sheets I looked at and it was 2,000 pounds and an arrow down for 30 days and it's like sure you probably fed that but how what was the composition of that so again as they're loading that corn in loading their hay their distillers balancer whatever products it's counting down on that left-hand side and they just have to simply push along the bottom of the iPad to see what ingredients next typically they would have that in a feeding order same thing when you're going out to to feed the cattle they would just push delivery now on that iPad

hit delivery, have their pins listed at the bottom. So as they get to that first pin, they tap that pin that's at the bottom of the screen, feed it out and then click on to their next one. easily able to distribute that feed, tap along and see where you're at. But as you're under or overloading those bunks or that feed ingredient, it's accounted for into our system and taken into account for back on the invoices and on the closeouts as well as all of our analytics.

Mike Donaldson (11:58)
So just to make sure we land on this hard enough, after I've been able to get the right mix into my mixer, now when I'm going to feed that to multiple pens, I've already entered the number of animals in pen 123. So I hit delivery, pen 123, and out of the 15,000 pounds I'm dragging around behind me,

it's going to tell me how many pounds to deliver in that specific pen.

Kory Lauridsen (12:34)
Exactly. we're going to have, know, so, you know, before you get to the, before you get to loading and before, and before you feed, you're going to be able to have your bunk call set in place. So on the overview screen of our system, you'll either be able to enter in, here's what total I want. Here's a total amount of feed. I want to feed on drop one or drop two. If you're feeding twice a day, or we've added in a bunk call page. So ⁓ as that, as that producer, as that feed caller is coming through and looking at the bunk, they're able to see, okay, here's

what our intake was yesterday. Here's what we've had for the maybe the last 15 days of intake, as well as here's some information about the pin, how many head what was their percentage of body weight by dry matter that we fed yesterday? What's their projected weight, so we're able to make that accurate call that communicates back to that load and off the door or out the door they go so

really really simple to use. they're making their feed calls. We have all the cattle that they would have in that pen already tracked, whether that's how many pounds they weigh or how many head there is in that pen or what do they cost.

Mike Donaldson (13:37)
And

only answer to the extent that you're comfortable. don't need you to, know, I certainly don't want you to tell me that Pine Ridge beef outside of a Tomah, found out that Ron was the worst feeder in the entire world. We had to get him out the door, but what are some of the, what are some of the stories coming back to you about that type of situation where we've taken the, cause from a nutritionist standpoint,

Kory Lauridsen (13:43)
Sure.

Thank

Mike Donaldson (14:07)
Getting the paper right is really, really easy. That's never been a hard thing. It's the classic, the ration formulated, the ration loaded, and the ration delivered all being the same ration. That's always been the challenge. And what are some stories that you can share about people maybe getting back to you and your reps about

Kory Lauridsen (14:12)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mike Donaldson (14:34)
my God, I had no idea how badly I was doing or how much better it would go by doing it right.

Kory Lauridsen (14:40)
Yeah, think, know, it's never, you know, how badly it was going. You know, I have been surprised though. think some guys, you know, with, uh, you know, an owner operator and maybe somebody different at the farm is feeding them every day. think they've seen a lot of surprises that, actually, you know what? does a lot better job at feeding than I thought. But the, uh, uh, you know, the biggest one that I get a lot of the time is, is, know, finally getting a realization of how much they're saving now or how much they're finally accounting for, you know, if all we were doing before was writing down a total and thinking that we fed

everything perfectly. Now these guys in real time can see or these owner operators can see in real time here's what we've under overloaded before that wouldn't be accounted for right so if they overloaded distillers by a hundred pounds on every load every day but they never accounted for that before you know now that's truly capturing a shrink that they had no idea that they didn't need to capture right so they're trying to you know they try and do their best pencil and paper and at the end of the year let's add everything up

Mike Donaldson (15:33)
Mm-hmm.

Kory Lauridsen (15:39)
up

and hopefully we have ⁓ some money in the bank to keep feeding cattle. But now we truly have a way that you can track that in real time and understand ⁓ how much money are we truly spending on these cattle, but also what's our savings. And some of that is going to be in that invisible shrink more or less that we didn't account for before, but now we actually have right there for us in real time. So, you know, the stories that I get, I mean, there are

pretty endless, for the company I get to travel across the country, whether that be to the Pacific Northwest, Canada, to the Southeast and Texas and wherever else I want to go around the country. ⁓ We get to see a lot of different people and success stories in the way that Performance Beef has impacted their operation has been ⁓ truly an honor, you know, at the end of the day, you know, and when we look at the origin story of our company, Dane Kuper, Dustin Balsley, independent cattle feed

smaller size that we get to go out and better serve ⁓ that medium to small to larger independent cattlemen ⁓ is really really cool and for us if we can help be the small tool or maybe a big tool to help keep them in business and keep them running and aware of what's going on at their operation it's really really fun I enjoy that that's probably what keeps me going at the company

Mike Donaldson (17:02)
So, and like, you know, because we're a nutrition company and that was where I first came into contact with your programs and products, but you've mentioned a couple of times, it goes beyond that. You're bringing in aspects of a cut sheet. You're bringing in finances. Could you give us a little rundown?

on what people are entering and then the information they're able to get back that they otherwise just, well, I mean, like you said, on one hand, if you pay all your bills and there's no money left in your checking account, that kind of qualifies as the start of success, but it doesn't give you any real direction about why. And you're bringing in a different level of, we're doing a great job on this.

Kory Lauridsen (17:49)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Donaldson (17:56)
but we're not marketing our animals well. This is something we could get better at and not just, yeah, we do a great job raising an incredibly high quality product, but it doesn't look like we're doing a great job of selling them. You bring a lot of assistance to people on that side too. Could you go into that?

Kory Lauridsen (18:11)
Sure.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, so as far as like, you know, as producers stay on our system for years and years and years, now they have all this data into their system. So whether that's their closeouts, past invoices that they'd like to, if they're custom feeding, they can look at past invoices, we can look at feed usage year over year. ⁓ We have yard. So we worked a lot in our yard sheet. So if they want a customized report for their operation, they can utilize that what we call a yard sheet. But recently, what we've added in there too, is yard

sheet dashboard. now take all that yard sheet data that you can that you can grab. There's a hundred there's a hundred plus different filters within our yard seats that you can grab from and then now you can create your own custom dashboard. So now year over year we can look at profitability. How much yardage have we had year over year? How is our cost of gain been by source? So are we buying cattle from the right people or the wrong people? ⁓ but to you know kind of adding to some of this point too Mike what's

What's really fun, know, so like our partnership in with Agri-King, you know, the producer is able to share their consultant onto the system so that they have real time access as well. So whether that's putting in a new ration or helping analyze that data, what we do is we try and bring all that that communication pipeline together. Right. So on those days that we're trying to figure out, you know, how are the cattle doing and what's going on at the operation no longer needs to happen. Right. Because you should be able to

see that in real time that what the nutritionist now can bring as they stop on farm is they have is they can have a real-time feel without even being there so when they show up we have valuable conversations when your feet hit the ground at the operation don't have to sit here and talk about how are the cattle doing you already know so that's what I think is a lot of fun whether that's their god forbid their banker shared onto their system or a consultant a vet consultant nutritionist

⁓ Any party that they feel the need to have involved on their Performance Beef account, they can share on there.

And then what's great for the producer, if they have questions for us, we have a support line that runs almost all the time. You know, and we have a great customer success team that works behind that, behind those scenes to help. as a producer has questions, they can line up at account review with us and the customer success team member that's assigned to their territory will run them through their account and walk through all their information. We can have on-farm presence with our sales team or myself, and we can walk through that information with them as well.

try and help dig in and see what's what's best but yeah from closeouts invoices yard sheets that you can customize analytics that we have built in so you can see your feed intake charts and so on and so forth a lot to digest in there but the great part is is connecting all of those advisors and consultants to the producer all at the same time

Mike Donaldson (21:12)
Great. And it really is. When you can take someone like a lender, whoever's handling your finances and when they can come over to the same side of the table as the rest of you. And instead of feeling like a review that you're going to pass or fail, you actually got partners that you're going to work going forward with. It's a small change, but it makes a big difference in how a business runs.

Kory Lauridsen (21:38)
Absolutely, and in today's market, you know, that's it's needed that that real time information is going to be critical and sometimes in your financing capabilities or just how are you going to continue to build your operation? You know, that real time information is absolutely necessary.

Mike Donaldson (21:57)
So you've gone into a little bit of my next question, but I'm still going to ask it for you to sort of, and it might be, well, I've already talked about that, but here's some more about that. And you referenced before, you're more than Performance Beef, you're PLA, but what are the other things that you can bring to an operation besides just the Performance Beef program?

Kory Lauridsen (22:21)
Sure, so today we have another product that kind of started at the same time or is a little bit before Performance Beef officially got launched. was a product called Cattle Krush. We've just refaced that app and just kind of revamped it a little bit here. what Cattle Krush does is it's a market advisor, I guess, or it shows that producer, you know, the quick profit and loss idea around a group of cattle that they could be buying. So if they're at the sale barn or maybe somebody

called him up and said, hey, I got these nine weight steers at such and such price, would you be interested? You could go into Cattle Krush, type in those numbers, put back in your cost of gain, typical cost of gain, rate of gain, and date that you'd be buying them.

Based off that finished date that it would have it would show here's what the board price is based off the CME It would show what that board price is and then it would give you a Krush profit on there as well So you would see are we making money or losing money on that?

quick form or fashion. able to make a decision on whether we buy those cattle. And then in that system, there's also a my lot section. So once you purchase those cattle, you're able to track those on and on from there. So that my lot section will just keep running in real time with the CME. There's like a five minute delay on it. But as soon as it refreshes, it's showing you exactly where your profitability is on those on that group of cattle that you've purchased. So able to connect that with your Performance Beef account, you're able to

see all the CME charts and graphs. We've just added that in so you can see the markets for the day. But yeah, that's been another one, you know, and I know we've looked at several other renditions of Performance Beef, whether that be ranch and all that stuff. So I think eventually we'll get into that cow-calf space. Today, we've really just hyper focused in on what do we need to add in Performance Beef to make it the best feedlot tool possible for the independent cattle producer that we serve.

Mike Donaldson (24:19)
That's wonderful, that's very cool. So hopefully, some people have listened to us today, they are excited. Obviously, most everyone I know of has the internet on some fashion. can certainly do a, you can certainly do a search for performance livestock. But in a short succinct fashion, how would someone go about getting in touch with your company?

Kory Lauridsen (24:45)
absolutely so they can always they can always email or give me a call or they could on our website we have a marketing team that does a really really good job so if you google search performance livestock Performance Beef performance livestock analytics PLA or any of that we'll probably pull up as the first search right in there but ⁓ if you go to our website it's kind of long one PerformanceLivestockAnalytics.com there should be a demo request form right in there gives you all the information on Performance Beef and you can see all of our

two videos within that as well and on Cattle Krush as well so whether you come to our website or ⁓ you know if you can grab my contact information directly you can always always reach out to me and I'd be happy to talk with you about what we can do for you.

Mike Donaldson (25:30)
this has been perfect. really appreciate you taking time to be with us today, Kory. ⁓ Beef is a big piece of what Agri-King does and it's good to this kind of an update on what sounds like an incredible system. Chris, what'd you learn today, buddy?

Chris Radke (25:35)
And I'm going to with a bunch of slides. And I'm going to end a bunch of slides. And I'm going end with a bunch

My big takeaway is Performance Beef and Kory kind of take all this information, all these pocketbooks or whatever they had before, and then they just kind of help it and distribute it to anybody that needs it and it just simplifies it. I love that idea of you take complex things and just simplify it because if it's all complex you'll never be able use it. I just love that idea. So keep it up Kory, that's good stuff. Helps everybody out. Otherwise it's just too hard to use and nobody's gonna want to do it.

Kory Lauridsen (26:11)
Absolutely.

Chris Radke (26:15)
Thanks Cory. If you liked what we talked about or if you'd to hear anything else, you can find us on just about any socials. Leave us a review on the podcast app you're using, whatever that may be helps us out. You can find us on the Agri-King website near the bottom, I believe. And if you have any questions or follow up thoughts, comments, can email us at podcast@agriking.com. And don't forget Mike has that lovely cow that we are looking for names. I believe this might be the third time we've discussed this. ⁓

Please submit your names for the cow with those lovely yellow boots.

Mike Donaldson (26:48)
And my apologies, Kory, I understand it's a Holstein, in the days of beef on dairy, I mean, we always ate a lot of dairy cattle without realizing it, but in the days now of beef on dairy, you guys are feeding a lot of cows and hidden somewhere in their genetics is a little bit of dairy. So we're not trying to be exclusive.

Kory Lauridsen (26:52)
you

That's right. Now appreciate you guys' time today. Thanks for having me on.

Chris Radke (27:15)
Cool. All right, Kory Mike, thank you very much.

Mike Donaldson (27:18)
Thank you guys, great job.