Corvitac is a startup whose idea was born five years ago with the purpose of bringing digitalization to the livestock farming sector. The team developed a system to work together with overhead cameras and their software in order to count and report livestock automatically. Corvitac counts pigs accurately simply while they walk under the cameras. Now farmers only need to lead the animals orderly under the camera and their Pig-Counter will do the job for them. No tags, no marks needed.
Corvitac makes daily counting and rehousing processes less stressful for animals and more simplified and convenient for farmers.
Interview with Lidia Pereyra, Marketing and International Sales at Corvitac.
Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
Lidia Pereyra: The main focus of our activities is put into software development and computer vision, aiming to digitalize livestock farming tasks. We work hard to keep developing the ultimate tool that will fully automatize pig-counting processes around the world. Our software is extremely user-friendly and recognizes pigs of all sizes and colors, counting them automatically while video-recording. We aim to leave manual counting aside for good and allow farms and companies to invest their limited time in more important tasks, while still taking care of bureaucracy requirements and also being able to monitor their counts and the state of their animals anytime.
E.E: What are the ranges of products?
L.P: We currently offer two alternatives for our systems: one of them is a more potent server designed for its fixed installation in livestock facilities. These systems work like a computer and are recommended for companies with higher production requirements and for slaughterhouses. Our second Pig-Counter is compact and portable, making it suitable for any type of farm and process. Both systems can be ordered together with the compatible cameras and allow network connectivity for a fully implementation. Our software is a web-application available and optimized for both browser and mobile devices (Android/iOS). Software licenses are our main source of income and prices are flexible based on required counts and the size and needs of the client.
E.E: What’s the news about new products?
L.P: A new and improved version of our portable Pig-Counter will be launched in April this year, offering new possibilities to monitor the counts in real time directly on the device. It includes optimized, more powerful components and was redesigned to be even lighter and easier to use, improving its portability and usability. Our App was released in all platforms last year and the last version includes different new features such as: a live-counting option (with and without video-monitoring), easy corrections, automatic reporting of counts, summaries and easy exporting of data.
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
L.P: On the one hand, the market we operate in is, partly, highly influenced by tradition, which sometimes can bring challenges to companies that seek high-tech implementations and innovation, like ours. On the other hand, the market has also been in continuous change for the last decades, since more and more farmers of all sizes are looking to improve their efficiency in livestock processes as well as to increase their sustainability. This is, in our era, mainly possible with digitalization, which creates possibilities for niche markets such as “livestock monitoring”, unlocking business opportunities and the implementation of innovative technological products like our Pig-Counter.
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
L.P: Agtech has been shaping the future of agriculture for many years and this trend has progressively and increasingly spread to the livestock sector as well. The industry 3.0, robotics or AI keep bringing possibilities for startups or any company to keep coming up with new innovative products and ideas to develop more digital, efficient and sustainable livestock farming processes. The market will most probably keep making place for automation and more efficient practices, as it happened in many other sectors. These innovation trends and new technological solutions, if well implemented, will keep shifting farming processes to also achieve a much more environmentally friendly animal husbandry and an improvement of transparency, which transfers to society a needed return of confidence in the livestock industry.
E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?
L.P: Our Pig-Counter remains our main and most important product and solution to a currently existing problem in the livestock farming sector. By automating counting processes, we aim to solve different challenges that arise in the pig-farming industry. The traditional counting processes made by hand, very time consuming and prone to errors are replaced by a more efficient and simplified process that can be taken over by one person turning on the system and pressing “play”. Errors or “rounding up/down” in manual counting often result in significant losses of money for farmers and companies that can now with our systems always monitor, report and even prove with video the right amounts of animals entering and leaving their barns.
And while our Pig-Counter software and its extensions are our current priority, we also collaborate and work in a few other very innovative projects to be launched and implemented in livestock processes in the future.
E.E: What estimations do you have for 2022?
L.P: 2022 shall be a year for us to grow. Since the new version of the Corvitac Pig-Counter is basically plug-and-play ready, we will offer it directly from our website for any farmer to buy their pack and start counting automatically. In our office, we will keep listening to what our clients want while focusing also on the other developments for bringing new products into the market. One of these products will be a cloud solution bringing the data of different products together. This will automate the bureaucracy of the farmers further. With all our future products we will continue to improve to fit the expectations of our clients and the market. This year will for sure still bring many challenges for us and keep us busy, which is just what our team needs to be able to keep helping farmers around the world to fully automate manual documentation processes and develop products that benefit not only them but also animals, the environment and society.
