Farmers are drowning in data. Data from milk meters, sensors, pasture walks, invoices, lab tests… every day brings another information stream to interpret before the next milking or paddock move. Shaun Balemi knows the industry well. Born on a dairy farm and trained as a dairy nutritionist, he’s spent his career helping farmers turn numbers into practical changes that increase animal performance. But time was the bottleneck. He could only go into so much detail, so often. The idea for his venture landed with a simple question: what if the right insights & practical solutions showed up every day, in plain language, so farmers didn’t have to spend hours joining the dots themselves?
Meet the founder of myCOW, one of the ventures taking part in the Sprout Accelerator Spring25 Cohort. Shaun leads the venture, which draws on a broader network from within his well-established family business.
Taking complex on-farm data and marrying it to science, myCOW’s solution is an app that pulls milk data, cow-sensor data, pasture and feed measurements and farm data into one place, then checks it all against clear targets. Instead of having to connect the dots on multiple reports, farmers can easily see how the pieces fit, with AI integration offering straightforward interpretation and next steps. Additionally, if a metric needs attention, the app can connect the farmer with the right professional for the solution. Shaun learned early that people read the same story differently: some see patterns in a graph, others in a line of numbers, and others prefer a short written prompt or even audio when both hands are busy. Therefore, myCOW is customisable for each user, allowing the same message to be communicated in different ways, so the right message lands fast.
During his consultancy work, Shaun observed that farmers didn’t need a monthly dump of advice, it was a frequent, bite-sized snapshots of their own data. When he moved from monthly check-ins to ten-day reviews, he saw an increase in on-farm performance, so the natural next step for Shaun was to look into how he could provide automated daily guidance. That was the moment myCOW became a business he needed to build.
“As I saw the performance increases, I thought what if we could do this every day and actually give constant feedback, and from there I knew this was actually something that we could scale, and it could really help grow the performance of the New Zealand Dairy Industry as a whole”.
Right now, as part of the Sprout Accelerator’s Spring25 Cohort, the focus for Shaun and myCOW is on data quality excellence. Getting the accuracy and resolution that farmers can trust, before racing ahead to more features. Through Sprout, Shaun is seeking broader industry connections and the spark that comes from rubbing shoulders with big thinkers. His Sprout mentor, Ian Clark, is pushing the vision further, while also helping Shaun spot blind spots and unlearn ingrained habits.
Ultimately, MyCOW is gearing up to deliver high-accuracy, high-resolution data displays and interpretations that make daily decision-making easier for farmers everywhere.