Dr. Shari van de Pol is a leader in agricultural innovation, bringing her expertise in both software engineering and veterinary medicine to transform the dairy industry. And she is just getting started.
She is the founder and CEO of CATTLEytics, an ag-tech company, and she has been decorated with several awards, including RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Awards Innovation Winner in 2024, Entrepreneur of the Year in 2023 by Women in Communications and Technology and the CME Tech for Good Award. She also won the Farmer’s Choice award at the Canadian Outdoor Farm Show last year.
While she doesn’t want to discount the honours, it is clear from talking with her that Shari isn’t here for the recognition. She and her team are on a mission.
Their goal is to bring the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and technology to agriculture. She has seen firsthand how technology is revolutionizing other sectors and she won’t let agriculture be left behind.
The Rural Voice caught up with Shari as she was preparing to film for Dragon’s Den the next day. “One in nine people work in agri-food, but are one in nine Dragon’s Den pitches about agri-food?” she asks, rhetorically. “Agriculture and food production are critical to humanity, so why is it overlooked?”
Shari reflects back into history, noting that dairy cows were domesticated 10,000 years ago, and in the past, over three quarters of a person’s energy was spent just to grow, forage or prepare food — just to keep themselves alive. Now, we have a small proportion of society growing enough food for the rest. While it has freed up people to go into other occupations, they can so easily forget the farmers who are feeding them and providing them the luxury time they enjoy, she says. Consumers are disconnected from food and from farmers.
So, Shari aims to bridge these gaps. She is bringing tech to agriculture, and vice versa; she uses her platform in the tech and entrepreneurial space to promote agriculture and give farmers the recognition they deserve.
But she doesn’t stop there. She also aims to serve farmers in a practical way, by using technology to bridge the knowledge gaps on farms, to increase their efficiency and their bottom line. Not only here in North America, but she sees the need across the world, and especially in developing countries where geography and infrastructure can mean that farmers don’t have the same access to veterinarians, to research and extension. She aims to build technology that is inherently good, with sustainability and equity “baked right in.”
But, let’s go back for a second. Who is Shari and how did she get here?
Shari grew up on the outskirts of Hamilton, and she was driven by a passion for both animals and creativity at an early age. She started by pursuing both technology and the arts, with a degree in Computer Engineering & Society with a minor in Fine Arts at McMaster University, doing a semester in England to boot. When Shari graduated, she started with a small engineering start-up in Northern Ireland before joining IBM as a developer, honing her skills in software development and quickly rising through the ranks to lead a team within one of the company’s largest products.
But Shari felt a call towards agriculture that she couldn’t ignore. She started to shadow a large animal vet one day a week. “It was my favourite day,” Shari says. She loved the hands-on creativity that veterinarians needed to solve problems with farmers.
Mid-stride in her tech career, Shari pivoted. She went back to school in 2010 and completed a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine at the Ontario Veterinary College in 2014. She kept bringing her engineering mind to her work, developing data models to mirror milk production and milk quality in dairy herds in her spare time.
Her worlds came together; she connected her love for cattle and data analytics into CATTLEytics, and did software development for various clients.
Over the last decade, CATTLEytics has partnered with dozens of progressive dairies, some of the largest in the world, to find the pain points in their operations and use data and technology to solve them. The team began to develop software for dairy that would address these issues, and released it in 2024.
Managing the “soft side” of farming
One of the biggest issues her team identified in working with farmers was communication. They would say, “I’m great with cows, but not great with people,” says Shari. And because many dairy farms rely on many employees, she knew that’s where they should start. The team designed a task management app that coordinates job assignments and reporting, herd management and employee scheduling. They initially called it “Moo to Do.”
“We found that farmers were communicating work tasks to their staff on What’s App,” Shari explains. They often wouldn’t know if the message was received or if the job was done, and they would have to be scrolling back in the conversation to figure out what happened. “It was happening in a messy way,” she explains, and so their goal was to clean it up. The app allows for managers to input tasks in real time and for staff to check them off as they begin the task and when they are done.
They just launched a new function on the software, using AI to create task protocols. By just typing in the job and clicking a button, a step-by-step instruction guide is created in seconds, and it can include photos, videos and a quiz for employees to demonstrate that they understand the task. With AI, it can be translated into any language. With more dairy farms hiring foreign workers, the app helps farmers overcome the language barrier.
The tasks can be displayed on a digital whiteboard in a breakroom. Time is money, and the CATTLEytics team found that even saving just 15 minutes here and there by streamlining communication was saving $6,000 a month for one of their clients. As for farm managers, the app saved them an hour or two every day.
Jamie Beaumont is a dairy farmer near Mitchell and hires several young people from the area. He got onto the CATTLEytics task management app last year after seeing a demo at a Progressive Dairy Operator’s conference.
"A lot of the new tech we see is equipment,” he says, “but it doesn’t help us with the ‘people issues’ of farming.” Jamie has really liked using the mobile app with his staff and they took to it really well. “They are tech savvy, and it makes communication easier” he says.
What he really appreciates about CATTLEytics is that he can call up Shari, or one of her team, and suggest something for the software, and he will probably see it developed within a month or two. He works closely with Ester de Groot, Director of Operations at CATTLEytics, who also has a deep understanding of both dairy and technology.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure
Another issue farmers were having is that they had a lot of data but that it took a few different software programs to access it – it wasn’t all in one place. “It was all very siloed,” said Shari, and she wasn’t knocking the programs, but they just had a narrow focus and couldn’t give a farmer the whole picture. The CATTLEytics software doesn’t need to replace a farmer’s existing monitoring programs, but it connects them into a single dashboard, synching it all together.
The next problem, even if a farmer could put their data all together, was that they weren’t sure what to do with it. It is nearly impossible for the human brain to make sense of so many data points, but that is where AI comes in – (and just to reiterate, AI means artificial intelligence here, not the other AI that dairy farmers use!)
Back in 2012, Shari was using machine learning to design predictive models from historical farmer data and forecast future outcomes. She found that preliminary models were extremely accurate. Instead of guessing or waiting to see what a decision’s outcome would be in the long run and in the real world, these models allow farmers to get answers faster. This developed into a project with the code name “Milkshake,” which is the CATTLEytics app that now puts herd health, team management, milk production, breeding decisions (and more) all in one place, with easy-to-understand analysis of each animal.
On one particular farm, data was showing a drop in milk production starting nearly every October and the farmer hadn’t noticed. It was just at the time that he would switch to the year’s new haylage that (apparently) wasn’t quite ready for the cows to digest. While the farmer thought he was saving some money by not buying in feed, the data was showing otherwise.
As humans, we often make decisions by using our instincts or a “gut feeling,” but data-driven decisions are likely to pay off better in the long run. CATTLEytics is monitoring more than just milk production, but even small changes in animal movement and health, which can allow farmers to address herd health issues more proactively. Everything on the farm has a “digital twin” in the software, so it can be managed and analyzed. Medication and antibiotic use is also a component of the software; it uses real data to show economic losses and gains for its use, in order to drive decision-making.
The CATTLEytics software is almost limitless in the answers it can find for farmers. Just like stacking a sports team based on player statistics, farmers can now set their herd up in the same way, says Shari. The software can compare one cow’s milk production against the herd average, and over every year and lactation cycle. Or a farmer could type in a question and using AI, the software queries the farmer’s own data to get the answer. While Microsoft’s AI tool is called Co-Pilot, CATTLEytics call theirs “Cow-Pilot.”
“It is incredible what you can learn from this amount of data,” says Shari. “In an afternoon I could do something that used to take a month and a PhD to do it.”
Next steps for CATTLEytics
For Shari, it all started by going into the dairy farmer’s world and seeing where technology would make their lives easier.
“We’re not technology first, we’re people first, we’re animals first, we’re environment first,” she says, and notes that production efficiencies have inherent environmental benefits, and for methane emission reduction in particular. And with more data analytics, environmental reporting is also a breeze. Shari is working with dairy organizations to help make ProAction compliance easier as well.
There is still about a third of the platform that is in development and will be launched in the future, says Shari, excited to share the next part of the program with farmers. Shari has grown (and credits) an exceptional team of about 16 software engineers and dairy specialists that have cross-trained and have on-farm savvy. Sadly, the team lost a key collaborator and software developer, John Clark, last year to his battle with cancer.
The team has come so far with CATTLEytics, taking advantage of cutting-edge technology and putting it into the hands of dairy farmers. They have no plans to slow down. They recently received major funding from the Canadian Agri-Food Automation and Intelligence Network (CAAIN), Ontario Agri-food Research Initiative (OAFRI) and National Research Council, and FedDev. The Canadian government supports their work because of its benefits to the sector, says Shari.
If you went to the Canadian Dairy XPO in April, you would have seen Shari connecting with dairy farmers at the CATTLEyics booth. Farmers can get onto the CATTLEytics software quite easily from their website at cattleytics.com/get-started and for two dollars a day, the price is very affordable. “We didn’t want to make cost a barrier,” says Shari, and she says if farmers call them, they will gladly give them a coupon code so they can have a free trial. “It does take some time to get onto the software,” she says, but guarantees that farmers will get that time back in efficient managing the farm, and then some.
“We did some math for a certain farmer and estimated he could get a full year of his life back,” she says. She wants farmers to have a better quality of life, more time with their families and doing what they love, she says.
As for Shari, she keeps her days full, doing what she loves. Not only does she manage the team and connect with farmers, but she and her husband also have two young daughters and she is an avid musician and painter.
She doesn’t regret the move into the agricultural sector for a second. “Some people think that I had taken a risk to make the move,” she says, “but sometimes staying still is the risk. You’re risking that the rest of your life you’ll stay in an uncomfortable or uninspiring place.”
The dairy industry is better for Shari having made the move to entrepreneurship, to bring together her mind for data and her passion for people and agriculture. We’re excited to see where she and CATTLEytics will go next! ◊