Going from Clipboards to the Cloud

When Brad Balsley started farming and raising cattle on his dad’s farm in 1980, spreadsheets were used to track business expenses and animal growth. 

Brad carried a clipboard to jot down feed consumption and other information he needed for his spreadsheets. This process became tedious as the cow-calf and cattle-feeding operations expanded on the farm he and his wife, Jill, own near Floyd, Iowa. 

Today, Brad doesn’t need his clipboard. Instead, their recordkeeping vaulted into the digital age with a cloud-based software system designed just for cattle feeders. 

Most impressively, their son Dustin helped develop the specialized software program called Performance Beef. The software was a first for the cattle business because it allowed producers to capture feed, efficiency and financial information on an iPad and make real-time decisions.

Helping Dad go digital
Dustin didn’t plan to develop the software. A few years after college, he moved back to the farm to help his parents.

“I was getting more involved in the operation and found the records Dad kept were difficult to sift through,” he says. “Dad does a good job keeping track of a lot of information, but they are on his own spreadsheets.”

Dustin looked for software programs to help his dad but discovered that cloud-based programs for cattle did not exist. Fortuitously, Dustin already had experience in software development with a partner, Dane Kuper. They worked on row-crop software for a start-up company in California. 

In 2015, the two partners got together and started creating Performance Beef. Brad was the first customer.

“Producers feed with iPads that capture every pound of feed loaded and every pound of feed delivered,” Dustin says. “This allows us to create real-time close-out projections and real-time analytics to help producers make decisions day to day rather than once a year.”

The Performance Beef software was a success. Today, 3,400 beef customers use the software to feed 8 to 8.5 million head of cattle a year in four countries. Much of the growth comes from industry partners like nutritionists recommending the program to cattle clients. Dustin and his partner plan to continue expanding the software while marketing it abroad through their company, Performance Livestock Analytics. 

iPad managed feeding
For Brad, Performance Beef made feeding cattle more accurate. “Our adjustments are made so much more often and accurately,” he says.

“When my dad fed cattle, they fed the same thing every day, and it took a long time to fatten them,” Brad continues. “Now you tweak that ration, and the cattle eat it because the bunks are empty. We up the ration and improve efficiency.”

On the Balsley farm, a New Holland telehandler equipped with an iPad has the “recipe” for each ration loaded on it. The iPad also directs how much of the ration should be fed to each group of cattle and then records the amount delivered.

“Cost of gain is such a critical number to track when buying cattle and understanding where breakeven will be,” Dustin adds. “If you don’t know the cost of gain, you can easily overpay for cattle.”

The Balsleys buy groups of 240 calves weighing from 500 to 900 lbs. per animal and feed them to market weight, 1,400 to 1,500 lbs. This typically takes 180 to 220 days. 

The calves are first kept in outdoor lots and moved to a monoslope building as they get heavier. Brad built the monoslope years ago and likes how the cattle perform in the facility. It can be closed on the north in the winter and opened to let breezes blow through in the summer.

They also run a 210-cow herd of mostly Black and Red Angus. They feed out most of the calves except for a third of the heifers, which are kept for replacements. The Balsleys do their own artificial insemination. 

Many of the market-weight cattle are sold to a small Iowa packing plant that maintains a sustainable, low-carbon footprint. The company only buys beef within 120 miles of its plant. 

High-value ration
The Balsleys grow most of the ration fed to the cattle. The ration includes earlage, silage, hay and distiller’s grain purchased from a local ethanol plant. 

“When they started putting up ethanol plants, distiller’s grain was cheap, and it was 30% of our ration,” Brad says. “So much corn is raised here, and it really made people expand into cattle.”

“Now, distiller’s grain is more valuable than corn, and we are charged for it. And it still makes up 30% of our ration,” he adds.

They hire a forage chopper to produce the earlage and silage. The Balsleys use their New Holland round baler to put up 400 bales of alfalfa and grass for feed and another 2,000 bales of cornstalks for bedding. The feed bales are stored in a shed to maintain quality.

A next-generation transition
Brad and Jill are transitioning the farm to the next generation, including Dustin and his wife, Aleana, and a neighbor, Carl Nolt and his wife, Pamela. Carl works with the Balsleys and is passionate about farming. “They are both buying in, and I’m phasing out,” Brad explains.

The transition involved setting up an LLC (limited liability corporation) for the company and valuing the assets. When equipment for the farm needs to be purchased, either Carl or Dustin buys it.
 
“We look at who wants to buy into the company a little more,” Dustin says. “We buy the equipment, and it goes into the business’s assets. Slowly, we will take on a higher percentage of the operation.

“When Mom and Dad truly want to start walking away, we will look at the valuation of operation,” he continues. “If they want to sell so many shares, we have the opportunity to buy more of those shares.

“It’s always been a big goal of mine to buy the farm from Mom and Dad,” he adds. 

As Dustin continues to buy the farm, he is carrying on a tradition that started in 1923 with his dad’s grandfather, Dennis. Dennis passed the farm along to Brad’s dad, A.J., who passed it to Brad in 1980. Now, Brad is passing it along to Dustin, Carl and their families who will take the farm into the future. 

Editor’s Note: Innovation runs in the Balsley family. The Balsley’s son, Derek, and his wife, Jessica, created the world’s first fully accredited graduate university serving K-12 art educators.