HIROKI Sawai, who raises 2,200 cattle at his ranch in western Japan, received an alert on his phone one evening last year: a calf had fallen and wasn’t getting up.

He called on staff to check the barn immediately as fallen cows often require prompt aid and, if ill, treatment. The calf, which had tripped over some steps, was rescued, and Sawai was spared the loss of an animal that could be worth over 1 million yen (S$10,298) when sold as wagyu, high-quality Japanese beef known for its distinctive fat marbling and loved by gourmands.

The technology behind the alert, sold by Tokyo-based startup Desamis, involves sensors which monitor the movements of livestock. Algorithms analyse the data to detect unusual behaviour and possible illness. Even an accidental fall by a young calf or fattened cattle, which can weigh as much as a ton, could lead to death without quick attention.

“With the human eye we can only tell that a cattle is sick after it’s been so for a while, but the sensors can catch it at an early stage,” said Desamis CEO Koji Seike, who founded the company in 2016 after selling livestock equipment for Panasonic Holdings. Its technology also detects when heifers are in heat and ready for insemination, bolstering the chances of reproduction.

Such technology has come into focus in the past few years, with Japan’s government highlighting wagyu farming as a business in need of support.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visited wagyu beef producers in southern Japan in October, vowing to aid livestock farmers struggling with soaring feed prices due in part to Russia’s war in Ukraine as well as a weaker Japanese yen. In addition to promising aid to counter bigger fodder costs, the government has been offering subsidies for investments in technology such as Desamis’ sensors. The hope is that such intelligent monitoring technology will help cattle farmers in the same way precision farming and crop management software helped to curb labour costs and boost yields in agricultural farming.

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While boosting exports of Japanese food and drinks was once considered difficult due to costs, Asia’s burgeoning wealth and a weaker yen have lifted overseas demand for everything from the country’s strawberries and oysters to whisky and sake in recent years. The government, hoping for the same with wagyu, has set a target of expanding annual beef exports to 360 billion yen by 2030 — about seven times the 2021 level of 53.7 billion yen, according to trade data.

Farmers say overseas wagyu fans help make up for weak domestic demand, particularly in premium cuts such as sirloin. While Japanese consumers haven’t been swayed by the global movement to eat less meat, many have been put off by the high prices of luxury wagyu.

The wholesale price of an A4-ranked wagyu was 2,360 yen per kilogramme as of October last year, a 36 per cent increase compared to April 2020, when demand for inbound tourists and dining out fell due to the Covid outbreak. At the retail level, a wagyu chuck eye roll fetches more than three times similar cuts of Australian or American beef.

Desamis, which competes with Tokyo-based, farm management software company The Better and, globally, Dutch tracking and security software maker Nederlandsche Apparatenfabriek, says its sensors are worn by around 80,000 wagyu cows, roughly 4.4 per cent of such cattle in Japan. The company expects that to grow in five years to around 1 million, roughly half of all wagyu cows in Japan, as a labour shortage makes it even more pressing for farmers to manage herds more efficiently.

Sawai, who started using the sensors last April, said that while staff still monitor cows in person, the technology allows them to spot issues early and remotely.

“What we want to do is discover problems sooner, before they progress into something more complicated. As a result, they eat more feed, they develop better builds and the quality of the meat is better,” he said. “I think that using this technology means we can sell and export high-quality beef in a more stable way.” BLOOMBERG