At Double M Ranch in New Mexico, brothers Mike and Matt Ballou have built an operation where every decision is measured, and tested.
Double M is not a typical ranch. Until 2022 it was a dairy. When the brothers decided to leave the milking business, they replaced the parlor with 14,000 calf hutches and set about raising healthy, high performing calves at serious scale. Matt handles the day-to-day running of the operation, drawing on more than 30 years in the industry.
Mike oversees calf health and nutrition, the same subject he researches and teaches at Texas Tech. The ranch doubles as a proving ground for the brothers' nutrition company, MB Nutritional Sciences, where new feeding strategies are tested on real animals in real conditions.
An operation like that lives or dies on its records. With thousands of calves moving through the system, tracking health treatments, growth, and performance on paper or scattered spreadsheets was never going to keep up. That is where Breedr came in.
Today, every animal at Double M is recorded individually in Breedr. Health events, weights, and daily gain sit in one place, accessible from a phone standing in the pens. As Mike puts it in the video, having Breedr right in his pocket has made everyday operations easier, saving time and effort across the ranch. For a scientist, it means clean data he can actually analyze. For an operator, it means faster decisions and fewer things falling through the cracks.
The result is a ranch where research and practice feed each other. What the data shows in the pens shapes what gets tested next, and what gets proven flows straight back into how 14,000 calves are raised.
Watch the full story in the video above, and if you want to see what individual animal data could do for your operation, book a demo at
breedr.co.