Cattle breeding, you're doing it wrong. Maybe it's different in UK, but on every ranch I've ever seen, if the cows aren't just out with a bull or two for a portion of the year, which bulls live the rest of the year in a nearby pasture, they get artificially inseminated. The majority (I'm at 70% this season) of those AI'ed cows get pregnant. The rest receive the attentions of a pickup bull (sometimes after another AI attempt), which bull lives in the same locale as the rest of the cattle. Very few commercially successful ranchers are hauling cows a long distance to be bred.

It is good to get semen for AI from high quality bulls available from firms like Genex, but UPS ships semen every day.

Maybe they were thinking of thoroughbred horses? That breed of that different species has a live cover requirement for progeny registration, mostly to preserve some variety. Like cattle breeders, thoroughbred breeders need a lot more information than a picture...

> Cattle breeding, you're doing it wrong.

Try selling cattle.

I was previously a co-founder at (the now defunct) CloudHerd, an online cattle marketplace in Australia. We wanted to remove the requirement to physically transport cattle from seller-farm, to stockyard (physical auction house), to buyer (or back to seller if unsold). Massive waste of time and money, as well as increased stress on the animals and pollution from additional transport step.

At farm auctions, one or more large farms will sell their surplus stock that has never left that farm and has received all the same care as the cattle they're keeping. These make a lot more sense for cattle to introduce into one's permanent herd, but the result is a sort of "rich get richer" effect since only large farms with long histories can do this. We've gotten our last several bulls this way, at a farm where the owner's grandfather started the auction in the 1920s. It's also possible to purchase cattle in a private sale directly, but this is so inconvenient for the seller that it's less common.

I think there is a place for a tool that makes private sales less painful. However, there are a number of challenges. On average, cattle people are reluctant to use apps with the necessary complexity, and they are less likely to trust the app itself. Also, it would be difficult to capture all the relevant qualities of cattle remotely. How many private sellers have a scale? How many of them keep vaccination records? How many of them know anything about their cattle's EPDs? How many of them have even heard of persistent BVD (or whatever other disease is locally relevant; I'm told that in Kansas, pinkeye is still impossible to eradicate whereas we just vaccinate and forget it)? Who will haul the cattle from seller to buyer and how will the cost of that vary according to different buyers? Not all of these qualities will be important to any particular sale, but some of these would be the way to beat public auctions: get better prices for sellers and better cattle for buyers.

I’m ashamed I didn’t think of this :(

There's still time to start OK Corral Cupid! (=

They've been digital for decades now...

Did you know that most dairy listings wouldn't even show pictures of the bull? They're far more interested in the the Bull's daughters. (which you can see in both the fancy print catalog, and often the online listings as well)/

Hectare, maker of the app according to the article does have some catalog listings online, (like this one) https://www.sellmylivestock.co.uk/view/product/E0DE3752-5E89...

and some other useful sounding sites/services like sellmylivestock and graindex https://www.hectare.farm/ so perhaps it's the breezy article that makes the app seem so frivolous.

Does anyone know if the founders were from Yorkshire?

To be fair I also thought the same about the VW 'E Up' http://www.britishslang.co.uk/slang/ey-up

Tried singing up my golden retriever for tinder to find mates and they banned my account.