FoA 316: Poultry Tech with Alan Beynon of Poultry Sense and Arjun Ganesan of Ancera

Future of Agriculture

Thank you to our quarterly presenting sponsor, Merck Animal Health Verntures: https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/

Poultry Sense: https://www.poultrysenseltd.com/

Ancera: https://www.ancera.com/

For the first half of today's episode you’ll hear an interview with Alan Beynon, founder of Poultry Sense. Then in the second half you’ll hear from Ancera founder & CEO Arjun Ganesan, who I’ll formally introduce a bit late in the episode.

Alan Beynon is a veterinarian in the UK who started Prognostix, which used to be called Poultry Sense, in 2016. As Alan will describe, he saw a lot of opportunity in the use of sensors and data to improve animal welfare and efficiency. Merck Animal Health Ventures invested in the company in 2019 and then ended up acquiring them in 2021. We talk a little bit about that part of Alan’s story as well.

Connecticut-based Ancera is a pioneer in microbial-based risk assessment and monitoring solutions. So what does that mean? They have a proprietary technology that enables near real-time, rapid detection and quantification of microbial threats across all points in the food production process, from farm-to-consumer. If that’s still sounding vague, the way I sort of understood it in my mind was that biological interactions are more complex than chemical interactions. So for any type of biological intervention it’s important to know more than just did it work or did it not work. We need more data about the dynamics at play, and that’s what Ancera does for their customers. Founder and CEO Arjun Ganesan shares details as well as some specific use cases.