In the summer of 2020, Alamance County native Catie McVey earned her doctorate. from the University of California at Davis when 9,900 wildfires ravaged more than 4 million acres in California.
McVey, who attended Graham High School and graduated from the NC School of Science and Math in 2011, said experiencing Mother Nature’s wrath firsthand has had a strong influence on her view of science’s role in improving the human condition.
“It was like a realization that climate change is coming, much faster than people thought,” McVey said. “But I think we have an amazing system for that. The point of research is really to think about things that will cause problems in 10 years.”
McVey, who founded her small business, OsRostrum Inc., in Alamance County last year, said her entrepreneurship is what she believes is the perfect vehicle to combine her expertise in computer vision and animal science to benefit the region’s dairy farmers.
“I’m from Alamance County and I came home,” McVey said. “Technically we are still in the garage phase. We are still based on my family’s sixth-generation farm.”
According to McVey’s website, OsRostrum seeks to use the latest advances in artificial intelligence to “find new ways to provide farmers with data rather than replace it.”
McVey received a $5,000 small business grant from the Alamance County Chamber of Commerce in August.
“We do a lot of our work with… [Amazon Web Services] – a large portion of our computing power – and with the grant I was actually able to purchase something like a proper server system, meaning that rather than having to cover the ongoing costs of running our models on AWS, I have to [helps us save on] Infrastructure costs,” she said.
McVey is currently developing a mobile app called CowPhit, which she hopes will eventually be available in the Apple App Store, and will allow dairy farmers to use iPhones to create a high-resolution, three-dimensional scan of all of a cow’s physical characteristics to study them more closely . In-depth analysis.
“There’s a lot of ancestral wisdom when you look at a cow, you know, a strong back, straight legs, you know, a good hanging udder,” McVey said. “So we’re trying to take all of the tried-and-tested wisdom of that visual assessment and get the technology to do it at a scale that it can feed into those assessments on a national level.”
McVey said the iPhone scans of dairy cows’ paw and leg characteristics would be processed on a cloud server and a genetic evaluation would be created to give dairy farmers a better understanding of potential milk production and other data points.
“Our first module is actually the properties of feet and legs,” McVey said. “There’s no point in having a cow with Ferrari genes if she doesn’t have good feet. It’s like driving a Ferrari with a flat tire.”
McVey said her passion for using technology to make a positive difference in the lives of farmers is what gets her out of bed in the morning.
“I love the cowmen as much as the cows,” McVey said. “The farmers I have worked with here in Alamance County have been great. When I was out West, I worked with some of the best dairies in the US [studying] for my masters and my Ph.D., …but it was great to come back and spend time with… [local dairy farmers].”
McVey said the Research Triangle is one of the best places in the world for an agritech startup like OsRostrum.
“We have an amazing ecosystem here in North Carolina, especially for first-time founders and especially female founders,” McVey said. “I can’t imagine starting this startup anywhere else.”
McVey credits her innate stubbornness with helping her overcome the everyday obstacles all small business owners face while staying true to her passion for giving back to her community.
“Entrepreneurship is hard,” McVey said. “I told someone recently that I was afraid my ego would disappear from me, and the exact opposite was true. I just fail at everything all day until it works. It’s very humbling.”
