By Amarachi Okafor
Around the world, cattle farmers wake up before dawn every day to care for animals that will ultimately feed people they’ll never meet. They manage their herds on slim financial margins, make expensive decisions with incomplete information, and often do so without basic tools that wealthier operations take for granted. One of those tools is a cattle scale. Cattle scales cost thousands of dollars, require labor intensive set-up and maintenance, and are not a realistic purchase for many farmers.
Alejandro Ortiz Lopez (MSPPM ‘26), a recent graduate of Heinz College's master’s program in public policy and management, wants to help.
Ortiz Lopez teamed up with fellow Heinz College alumni, Shrikanth Karthik Pudur Sashikumar (MISM ‘25) and Tanner Balluff (MSISPM ‘26), to create a solution. Their startup, Luzardo, uses computer vision to let any farmer in the world estimate the weight of their cattle using nothing but a smartphone. The stakes are higher than they might seem.
Cattle weight drives feeding decisions, determines when an animal is ready for market, affects how much a farmer earns per sale, and shapes whether an operation turns a profit. Weighing cattle traditionally requires expensive equipment and significant labor; it also has real physical costs to the animals.
"The process takes a lot of time and a lot of labor," Ortiz Lopez said. "It's extremely painful for the animal. It's very stressful to the point where a cow can lose up to five percent of its body weight. The whole process is so hard that most farmers just decide not to do it because it's difficult and expensive."
When farmers skip the process of determining an exact weight, they’re forced to make costly guesses. Feed is wasted. Animals go to market at the wrong time. Revenue is left on the table. For small and mid-size operations in developing countries, those inefficiencies compound into significant economic hardship.
Ortiz Lopez first recognized this challenge while working in Venezuela, where he had the chance to speak with cattle ranchers. Among the many issues they faced, one need consistently rose to the top: subsidies for cattle scales. Then, at CMU, he found himself in an unrelated conversation with cattle ranchers from Ohio. They said the same thing: they needed subsidies for cattle scales.
"After that, I thought: if it's a problem in Venezuela and it's a problem in the United States, most likely it's also a problem elsewhere," Ortiz Lopez said. "And it is. We have pilots in India, in Spain, and in so many different countries that share this same pain point."
While Ortiz Lopez couldn’t do anything about the subsidies, he believed technology could offer farmers a more accessible alternative to traditional cattle scales. That’s when he and his team started working on Luzardo.
Ortiz Lopez and his team created an app that uses artificial intelligence to estimate a cow’s volume and weight in seconds. A farmer opens the app, takes a few photos or a short video of an animal from different angles, and the model returns a weight estimate. This information is used to track animals over time; data and trends show up on a dashboard in Luzardo.
Depending on the cattle breed, accuracy runs between 90 and 95 percent. The team has trained their models on five different breeds and is expanding that data as they deploy and monitor their pilot programs.
Critically, the app runs entirely offline. Most farmers Luzardo is designed to help lack reliable internet access in the field, so relying on a cloud connection was never an option. The models have to be lean enough to run directly on a smart phone.
Currently, Luzardo has nine pilot programs running across five countries. The team is preparing to launch commercial operations in Spain, where a team member connected at an industry conference with the head of the country's largest cattle association. This summer, the company is joining an accelerator program in San Francisco.
Ortiz Lopez came to Heinz College through the Public Policy and International Affairs fellowship at the University of Washington, where someone described Carnegie Mellon to him as one of the most technically gifted universities in the country. He wanted to gain as many technical skills as possible, so he enrolled in the AI Management concentration. He took courses that, by his account, fundamentally shaped what Luzardo became.
"It truly gave me the tools to understand the technology," Ortiz Lopez said. "Even if I'm not building the architecture and training the neurons myself, those courses gave me the capacity to use those technologies and apply them into real-world problems, to understand the capacity and the limitations of the technology."
Use data analysis and evidence-based decisions to make an impact.
Our policy curriculum provides instruction in statistics, economics, finance, organizational design, and presentation skills. You'll leave here prepared to tackle policy in any realm you choose.
Three courses stood out. Ortiz Lopez said Introduction to AI and Fundamentals of Operationalizing AI gave him the technical grounding. Responsible AI built on that foundation.
"People are making important decisions based on information that the AI provides," Ortiz Lopez said. "How can I ensure that I maximize the utility of the application without compromising the financial security of any of the users, without compromising the information of any of the users? That's the system of thinking that these classes provided me, that I use on a daily basis."
Heinz College also gave him his co-founders. His partners Balluff and Pudur Sashikumar lead the technical work on Luzardo. Mitchell Larson, an alumni from CMU’s Tepper School of Business, and Shresth Kumar Singh, a contributor from CMU’s Engineering and Public Policy department, have also been part of the team.
"Heinz gave me the capacity to meet two of my co-founders who are great professionals, technically gifted, humanly gifted as well," Ortiz Lopez said. "But without the education that I received from Heinz, I wouldn't have been capable of identifying how excellent the work that they are putting on a technical level is. If you don't have the tools to identify what's good work and what's not good work, it's really easy to get lost."
Pudur Sashikumar said his experience at Heinz College influenced his work with Luzardo as well.
“What I loved about my CMU and Heinz experience was that in a single day, you could be doing two very different activities, like writing code and negotiating,” Pudur Sashikumar said. He said that preparation translated well into his current role. “Here, my day has at least a few of these activities present: negotiating deals, product strategy, public speaking/presenting, developing AI models, and interviewing stakeholders.”
The MISM program prepares students to be innovative and ethical leaders who design technology with people in mind.
Our program blends technical and leadership skills, equipping you with the ability to transform organizations through technology.
Ortiz Lopez described the challenge ahead for Luzardo. Cattle ranching is not a uniform industry. It looks different in every country, on every farm, under every economic system. Building a product that works across all of it, he said, is harder than building the technology itself.
"Farming-cattle ranching – it's not a homogeneous process," he said. "Creating a product that is capable of being useful in all these countries, in all these different use cases, in all these different systems, it's challenging."
But the vision to overcome that challenge is clear. Ortiz Lopez is focused on “precision agriculture,” a data-driven farm management strategy, as a way to simultaneously improve farmer income, reduce carbon emissions, and bring down the cost of food for consumers.
"My dream is to help farmers make more money than what they're making right now and help meat prices go down," he said. "I believe it's our responsibility to optimize the operations as much as possible to decrease those carbon emissions, and precision agriculture is the pathway to do that.”
Underneath all of it is something more personal: deep respect for the people doing the work.
"There are millions of people who wake up every day at 2:00, 3:00 a.m. and go out to the fields to make sure that people that they don't know will eventually have access to food," he said. "I would even say that it's a public service. And for me, the goal is to help that hard worker make sure that they get what they deserve."