By Brady Drake |
J. Alan Paul Photography
PRECISION RANCHING IS HERE 701x Founder Kevin Biffert is Making Sure it Stays 2:17 a.m., a rancher’s phone vibrates. A bull, worth more than a nice used pickup truck, has crossed a fence line miles from the nearest road. In another pasture, a cow’s movement has slowed just enough to trigger a health alert before visible symptoms appear. These are the moments ranchers rarely see in time. On a screen in downtown Fargo, those moments show up as dots moving across a map of western North Dakota. Each dot is an animal. Together, they form a realtime picture of where cattle are, how they’re moving, and what their behavior might be signaling about breeding, health, or risk. The company behind it all is 701x, a company with a straightforward mission statement to help ranchers “do more with less," but the path to getting there is anything but typical. 701x’s founder and CEO, Kevin Biffert, didn’t come up through software startups or agtech accelerators. He came up through industrial automation. Precision ranching, as Biffert frames it, is about using real-time data, including location, movement, behavior, and records, to reduce guesswork and physical check-ins, especially across large, remote operations.
Biffert described to us that earlier chapter in numbers that still sound unreal: high-speed lines reaching “1,200 a minute” producing sophisticated packaging equipment for syringes and medical devices. He founded his first company, Fargo Automation, in 1996, and sold it in 2017. After the acquisition, the company became part of Körber (via Körber Medipak). That two-decade run in automation did more than teach Biffert how to build machines. It helped him build a philosophy that productivity is what unlocks a better life. He says he learned that early at 3M, where he watched a company maintain roughly the same headcount while growing revenue. That wasproof, to him, that “you’re always going to have to do more with less.” Whether it’s factory lines or ranch work, efficiency that improves someone else’s day. 701x is his attempt to transplant that worldview onto the cattle industry with precision ranching, which is the idea that you can manage cattle and infrastructure with real-time data—location, behavior, health signals, and records—so fewer decisions depend on physical check-ins.
FUTUREFARMERMAG.COM
19