OREANDA-NEWS. September 28, 2012. Fujitsu today announced software as a service (SaaS) intended to help the livestock industry manage the raising of beef cattle. The Beef Cattle Management SaaS adds to Fujitsu's ICT services that support the food and agricultural industries—the Akisai cloud for agribusiness.

This SaaS aims to help raise beef cattle enables integrated management and visualization of a variety of data, including on individual cattle, the cumulative cost of input up to a given point in time for each head of cattle (cost of work in progress), and day-to-day feeding. This thereby contributes to high-quality, low-cost cattle production. With farmers raising more cattle with less staff, this will help them maintain quality, control costs, and improve their technological edge. For the JA Group, a nationwide organization of farmers that plays a major role in Japan's wagyu, or Japanese beef, industry, this SaaS not only will reduce the effort involved in managing individual cattle, it will also increase agricultural leadership through data analysis.

Going forward, Fujitsu plans to link this service to others it offers, including the Gyuho system that provides animal husbandry support so as to raise cattle birth rates to one calf per year, and the Business Management SaaS, which adds improved managerial capabilities to the food and agriculture cloud. These links will support integrated cattle management as a business through ICT.

As Japan's cattle farmers grow older, the number of people working in the industry is declining, while at the same time the number of cattle per farm is increasing. This means farmers need to be able to manage many head of cattle with little staff. And with feed costs rising worldwide, farmers need to consider ways to control costs and optimize feeding.

Modern cattle farming covers a variety of disciplines, including breeding, feeding, and drug administration management, but because they are so disparate, farmers have been hard-pressed to make effective use of relevant data. A unified way to analyze all the data that arises, from birth to shipment, is becoming vitally important for properly raising and managing each head of cattle.

As of today, Fujitsu is offering this beef cattle-raising management SaaS as an addition to Akisai, its existing agricultural cloud for the food and agricultural industries. This provides unified data management to the livestock industry, helping cattle farmers to increase their work efficiency and to produce quality cattle by visualizing costs and work processes.