How did you come up with this concept?
While pursuing a degree in Electrical Computer Engineering Technology, Jeannina was required to take a Capstone class. This was designed to incorporate everything she learned in the degree and apply it to a real-life situation. With some major bumps and her team breaking apart, her professor gave her a choice: join another team to finish the class or do her own project and redo everything. She took a night to weigh her options, and through that, an idea started to form.
What if there was a fire safety design for barns?
With the remaining time of the semester, Jeannina used everything she could to present a detailed market analysis, showing not only that this concept was relevant but also desperately needed. Pulling whatever information she could find to show her professor, along with actual opinions of different equestrians, Jeannina presented her findings along with a basic concept of an automatic door. Christmas break came, and Jeannina thought, "Great, that's over. Now to do the last semester and get the degree." Her last class in college required a fully functional prototype as a final.
With approval from her professor, she was allowed to continue her barn door concept from Capstone with a classmate. In this setting, her Capstone professor pushed her to look into different opportunities that the university had for students and their ideas. In one semester, we had our name, Livestock Lifesavers, our logo brand, and a fully functional manual sliding barn door prototype that would also be automatic once a sensor was triggered.
What is the practical application?
After being invited to a networking event in April 2023, everyone asked Jeannina, 'Why should anyone have this?' or 'Are you sure this would be needed?' Everyone said it was cool but not really needed right now. 48 hours later, tragedy struck at the South Fork Dairy Farm in Dimmitt, TX.
Nearly 18,000 dairy cows burned alive because they were trapped inside.
Due to the design of the dairy housing, after equipment malfunctioned and started the blaze, it grew too fast for extinguishers to be used. The only thing left was to run or get caught in the blaze as well. It took 15 minutes for the whole structure to go up in the blaze, creating an environment too dangerous for even first responders to get in. With each cow roughly worth $2,000, it was a devastating loss to the South Fork Dairy Farm. It was amazing there were no human lives lost, even with one person being trapped inside until a rescue team could reach them.
Roughly $32 million went up in flames for the cows alone with that fire. Every year, there is at least one major incident that results in the death of livestock; from fire, to freezing, to flooding. This is what we at Livestock Lifesavers have been working to prevent and will continue to improve and adapt modifications so that these deaths don't happen again.