The Country 02/07/25: Matthew Zonderup talks to Jamie Mackay

Perfect Cow Breeding Solutions is like Tinder for Cows, driven by ChatGPT. It was one of the innovative rural apps discussed at the Primary Industry Summit. Today we yarn to the Matamata dairy farmer who stumbled across the “perfect cow breeding solution”.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So what is it about these Madamata cow cockies and agtech.
You've heard from Craig Piket, the chief executive Opholter. His
company is now worth US one billion dollars. Well, one
of the innovations we talked about last week at the
Primary Industry summit came from another Madamta cow cocky who's
come up with an app called the Perfect Cow Reading Solution.

(00:23):
It's like Tinder for cows, driven by chat gp GPT.
I keep wanting to say GDT. Of course we've already
had one of those last night. So Matthew, a zonderop
joins us. Matthew, you have a connection with Craig Picket.
This is uncanny.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah, yeah, Actually I used to work for the Picket
so when they're out in Wardville and Craig was just
a young boy who was just learning how to milk
and who was feeding cars with his mum, and I
used to meet with him a bit during the school
holidays and sometimes in the weekends.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
So you could see he was a bright young bloke
even back then.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
I think I was thinking about it when I was
talked to Malcolm a while back at field Days, and
I think even then they were already talking about GPS
four cows, you know, over ten years ago now, So talk.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
To me about your creation, because you created quite a stir.
I think you were mentioned in dispatches by let me
guess who was it. Was it the PM's chief Science officer,
Brian Yeah, yeah, John Rush not Brian Rush here, so
he mentioned you in dispatches. So you're kind of up there.
But your Eureka moment, because we talked to Craig about

(01:36):
his Eureka moment, he said his was a bit more
of a slow burn, but yours came about because of
a mistake he made.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, that's right. I made it just a simple coding
here in a spreadsheet what I was planning for mating.
And I had one workbook open with five individual spreadsheet
sheets all linked together, and they were, you know, all
the all the herd bvs and heifers are getting ready

(02:04):
for mating. And I made it wasn't a coding era
what I thought it was. It was actually a spelling mistake.
And I've heard about chat GDP. I've played around with
it a little bit, nothing to the extent what I
was about to experience. And then I uploaded it into
chat GDP to find the coding era. It came back

(02:25):
within five seconds that it was a spelling mistake. It
corrected the spelling mistake, streamlined the code, and gave it
back to me and said it's a common mistake to
make at this time of night, and I'd fix the era.
And then it asked if I wanted to do anything else,
So I thought, I've got nothing to lose. It's just
heard BEVs. I uploaded those and to herd bvs and

(02:48):
then all of a sudden it analyzed it extracted data
that I wasn't thinking about doing, and then it just
after then it just took off.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
Okay, so did you I mean we talked about Craig
Pugget Puggot, but did you have a background in tech computers?
What's your background?

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Not to this sort of extent. No, No, I put
computers together and you know, made a network and that
sort of thing, but not comparison to you know, what
what is in the cloud now and doing and doing
this sort of thing. It's it's a completely different beast now.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
So tender for cows. How does it work?

Speaker 2 (03:25):
Well, Basically, what it does is we take the herd
BVS of a cow. So most most guys have genomically
tested or DNA profiled their animals now and they've got
the herd bvs and loaded into mindor or my herd
from CRV, and we take those bvs in a spreadsheet
and then we throw it at our CHATCHIDP engine. And

(03:49):
then thanks to all the good folk that throughout New
Zealand that have in put a lot of data and research,
you know, Mngael Perian z l o C. That's all
public and available data that we can utilize and it
interprets it in a manner that's suitable for pasture based
farming in New Zealand. And then we can decide which

(04:12):
traits are the need to be enhanced, corrected or improved.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
So is this a career path for you? Are you
going to drop the dairy farming and become a tech
entrepreneur like Craig pigot.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Ah It would be I think that would be a
bit of a nice a nice dream. So I think
there's still a bit of water to go under the bridge.
Yet in terms of development, we're pretty well there. It's
now it's just building the I suppose building the following
like Holter, you know, once you get a momentum going,
it's you know, it's it should there be no stopping us.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
Really, well, free plug time. Are you in the market
at the moment? Is your product out there?

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yes, yeah, yep, yep. We're already doing several herds already
now and we're fine tuning those down, you know, to
out a confirmation smat excel count. You know, all the
things that people are looking for, and we're but we're
able to find a ball that can actually match not
only those traits, but maybe improve others that you generally

(05:09):
wouldn't find as such, compared to when you're looking at
a catalog, because most guys, you know, if they're browsing
through a catalog, it can take them up to six weeks,
you know, to sort a ball team out for the herd.
We can do it in a few hours now.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
Wow, wonderful technology. Hey Matthew, it was really good to
catch up with you in person at that primary industry summit.
I tip my hat to you tech entrepreneurs because I'm
technically inert, so I'm fascinated by what you can do.
Good luck with your venture and keep in touch.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Thanks very much. We'll do