Iowa, Kansas and Irish Aggies

DUBLIN (DTN) -- While thousands of Iowa State and Kansas State alumni traveled here last weekend for a football game between the two highly competitive American universities, Enterprise Ireland, the country's trade and innovation agency, and the governors of Iowa and Kansas saw an opportunity to foster both academic and agricultural business integration between Ireland and the two Midwestern states.

Before Iowa State beat Kansas State 24 to 21 on Saturday, Enterprise Ireland showed off some of the country's latest agricultural equipment, and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, and Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, visited University College Dublin and spoke with Irish officials about both bringing more Irish students to study at their universities and attracting more Irish capital to their states.

It was a marvelous idea, Reynolds said, to "combine football with an international meeting of the minds."

While Ireland is no slouch at selling Irish foodstuffs in the United States -- think Kerrygold butter and other dairy products -- Enterprise Ireland has a different purpose: to help innovative Irish businesses go global. Consider that Ireland is an island the size of South Carolina with only 5.38 million people; If an inventive Irish entrepreneur has a good product, it quickly saturates the domestic market and needs to go abroad to find more customers.

Irish officials also emphasize that, while exports create jobs in Ireland the country also ranks as the sixth-largest source of foreign direct investment in the U.S., with $351 billion invested in 2023. "On a per capita basis, Ireland is the world's top investor in the U.S., with the top 10 Irish employers in the U.S. supporting over 116,000 American jobs and tens of thousands of indirect jobs," Enterprise Ireland said in a news release. Irish companies also spend billions buying U.S. raw materials, goods and services, the group noted.

But only a small percentage of that Irish investment goes to Iowa and Kansas, and the activities surrounding the football game were an opportunity to showcase that potential.

Kansas, Kelly noted, is in "the animal health corridor, the largest concentration of animal health companies in the world. It is wonderful to see the collaboration in advancing education, research, commercialization and industry partnerships. We must work together. We value our relationships with international partners. Tomorrow's bioscience challenges will be addressed in the heartland today. For more growth we are being proactive, going after investments that keep our state growing."

Enterprise Ireland's executives took reporters to a farm about an hour and a half from Dublin to see Herdwatch, a livestock and land management platform used by cattle operations recording everything from calving and breeding to grazing and herd performance.

On her 147-acre, 121-animal Angus, Hereford and Charolais Stoney Road Farm near Timahoe in County Laoise, Mary Lawlor said the Herdwatch system helps her keep track of information for compliance with European Union environmental rules as well as with production. With Herdwatch, Lawlor said, she keeps track of "when cows are sired and when they will calve."

With help from Enterprise Ireland's seven offices around the United States, Herdwatch is now expanding throughout the country, serving everywhere from small Waygu beef farms on the East Coast to big ranches in the West.

The market, said Meghan Bochanski, Herdwatch's Cheyenne, Wyoming-based North American growth manager, is cow and calf operations. While U.S. dairy farmers have used digital record keeping for some time, there has been a lack of software for beef operations, Bochanski said.

"The biggest competition is pen and paper," Bochanski explained. The Herdwatch system, she added, not only saves time and paperwork, but allows the cattle owner to develop "insights" into how to improve the herd, which pen and paper do not.

At University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland's top agricultural school, professors and entrepreneurs showed off a range of agricultural companies that are trying to expand in the U.S. market:

-Dairymaster, a company that makes milking parlors, feeding systems and the MooMonitor+ health tracker.

-JFC Group, which makes plastic agricultural products including a calf feeder and a water trough.

-EASYFIX, a livestock housing and slurry management company that makes rubberized flooring and methane-reducing systems that enhance animal welfare and reinforce Ireland's leadership in sustainable agritech.

-Bimeda, a global veterinary pharmaceutical company that already has year-to-date sales of $7.3 million in Iowa with products like the ImmunIGY Bovine IgG test for calf health.

The efforts to enhance U.S.-Irish trade relations could be impacted by President Trump's tariffs on European goods, but Enterprise Ireland announced today that it will help its companies deal with the problems caused by tariffs.

In a statement to The Hagstrom Report, Enterprise Ireland said, "The U.S. is and will continue to be an important primary export market for Irish exporters. The new U.S. 15% tariff rate is a challenge for Enterprise Ireland product-based client companies exporting to the U.S."

Enterprise Ireland said its response to the tariffs will include "a new market research grant which offers funding of up to $41,000 for companies to assess the full impact of tariffs, gain market insights and develop mitigation strategies." On its website, Enterprise Ireland has provided more details to its clients.

Enterprise Ireland has seven offices across the United States with 34 staff members, in New York, Boston, Austin, Atlanta, San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago.

Jerry Hagstrom can be reached at jhagstrom@nationaljournal.com

Follow him on social platform X @hagstromreport

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