CowboySmart is management software for feeding and medicating cattle. CowboySmart is the brainchild of Lonnie Owens, a Kansas businessman and serial entrepreneur. As the story goes, Owens created the first generation of what is now the CowboySmart feed program because a friend, a ranch manager, complained about how long it took to create his feed sheets.
He was calculating rations by hand and I told him I could help him do it faster. He didn’t believe me. So I created a rough feed program using an Excel spreadsheet. Our first testers took awhile to get used to it, and now say they don’t know what they’d do without it. It’s become more than just a feed program, managing all aspects of taking care of livestock. What it took our subscribing ranches an hour a day to do before CowboySmart now takes four minutes.
Two professional software generations later, on the heels of a whole lot of interest from ranchers, vendors, a nutritionist and a national animal health giant, CowboySmart is still simple, even faster and has a few more easy bells and whistles like inventory, invoicing and reporting capabilities. It’s the ranch hero Lonnie Owens said it would be from the beginning:
Cattle feeding is a competitive industry. A ranch manager may manage his operation so tight he’ll sweep the rations from the sides of the feed wagon when he comes in from feeding.
Thirty pounds of loss recovered per day over 365 days is 10,950 pounds.
The monthly cost for a ranch/feedyard is equivalent to one tank of fuel.
CowboySmart saves you time and money and makes you more accurate. Figuring out rations for a thousand head of cattle eating 20 pounds a day means a lot of calculations and handwork. If your labor cost is $10/hour and you save one hour of handwork a day with CowboySmart, you save $300 a month. You save $100 over the monthly cost of the software.
Today’s rancher/feedyard owner must achieve gains in a cost-effective manner. And today’s cattle operator needs big data just like every other business seeking to maximize profits. CowboySmart saves time and math so managers spend time managing: