After a couple of years of quietly organising itself, one of Scotland's brightest agricutural high technology companies, eCow has suddenly turned into a fully fledged team of people, which is hot in the futherance of new generations of telemetry monitoring bolus development.

The team now includes Seonaid Nimmo, product design manager, and Ann Dickie, office manager with 20 years of financial and business administration experience. Newest recruit,  head of Behavioural Research to use a comfort collar and  develop techniques to detect calving and mobility score, is (left) Hanna Miedema.  That's the required team of three women to ensure the organisation is innovative and progressive.

Commercial director is Adrian Jones, who looks after the IT and walks his dog on East Lothian beaches. Chairman Dr David L O Smith was a co-founder and operations director of Receptional, an internet marketing company, and currently director at Unicorn Trails (worldwide horse riding holidays) who was invited to join eCow in 2008.

At e-cow's head, so to speak, is founder Toby Mottram, whose degree in Engineering and Agriculture was won while working as a cowman, then a Masters at Cranfield University and he helped helped invent robotic milking at Silsoe Research Institute going on to develop cow breath sampling, in-line milk progesterone analysis and in 2003 the e-Cow rumen pH bolus.

He claims to "let the team get on with the work most of the time" while he acts as science coordinator for the UK's agricultural greenhouse gas research projects for Defra. Oh, yes, in his spare time he's am studying for another degree in Computing and Statistics.

"Our Rumen Analyzer is an unrivalled bolus technology that records rumen pH and temperature continuously for weeks within calibration.  It is also available with redox (reduced oxygen) and ammonium sensors.

"The data is automatically stored at 1-59 minute intervals continuously.  Typically used by researchers and nutrionists for trials and experiments, it remains resident in the rumen reticulum and can be used in fistulated cows or can be inserted by mouth.  It remains accurate to within 0.2pH units of true for up to 90 days. 

"Data is downloaded by approaching the cow with a wand attached by USB to a tablet PC. The data that the Rumen Analyzer produces is in .csv files and is formatted by the eCow software to provide key information. It also can be analysed with standard packages."