PaddockOS
Founder

Andrew Freshwater

Founder of PaddockOS, CEO of Moorella Ag Holdings and Director of Clear Creek Pastoral Co · Byawatha, North East Victoria · MAIAST, CPAg

Andrew Freshwater is CEO of Moorella Ag Holdings Pty Ltd, which runs cattle and sheep on properties across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, and he's a seventh-generation livestock producer whose home base is Clear Creek at Byawatha in North East Victoria, where he and Angela Murphy run Angus and Red Angus cattle, the Advancer composite and the Catalyst shedding sheep flock.

Breeding livestock and building the tools to measure and select them is what he's done for his whole working life, going back to when he'd exported sheep genetics to nine countries by the age of nineteen, live rams to southern South America among them while he was still in Year 12, and since then he's imported the Leachman Stabilizer cattle into Australia, helped set up a cattle breeding system on the Kazakh steppe, built a sheep genetics supply chain and recording system for Sweden's largest food company and worked with an overseas government and university group on a tropically adapted cattle composite.

He's also a director of Clear Creek Pastoral Co, he holds MAIAST and CPAg accreditation and he publishes the Clear Creek Newsletter, and he's the one who built the software behind Genemap, TheFarmOS, PaddockOS and the Clear Creek tools, because he wanted commercial producers to be working from evaluation and management systems built around the traits that actually make them money, such as fertility, body condition, structure, docility and adaptation to the country they run on.

As he sees it, the future of sheep and cattle breeding belongs to climatically adapted composite breeds that have been measured properly in commercial conditions, and he's held himself to that by taking the phenotypes in his own dataset himself, on his own livestock, and writing the evaluation software that analyses them.

Why he built PaddockOS

PaddockOS grew out of running livestock across several properties at once, where the genetics, the cattle trading and the season all have to be looked at together rather than in three separate spreadsheets. It brings in genomic and breed-society figures from Inherit Select, BREEDPLAN and IGS so sires can be compared head to head and checked for whether they're breeding true, keeps a lot-by-lot trade ledger that shows where every dollar of cost went on a mob, pulls in the MLA indicator prices like the EYCI, heavy steer and feeder steer automatically, and tracks twelve months of rainfall with drought triggers and feed budgets, so the decision to buy, hold or sell a line of cattle is made with the breakeven, the market and the paddock in front of you.

Other work by Andrew Freshwater

Writing