Brendan Kennedy gave beef farmers the numbers the factories already had
Ballinahinch, near Cashel, Tipperary, Ireland · Brendan Kennedy
A part-time farmer with no coding background used two hours before work and two free AI tools to close an information gap an entire industry had lived with.
The story
The person and the place
Brendan Kennedy, 50, farms beef part-time in Ballinahinch, near Cashel, County Tipperary. He holds a full-time job off the farm and has no background in coding.
The problem
Beef pricing in Ireland was opaque, and Kennedy felt it from the inside. "The factories know exactly what every farmer is getting paid. Farmers don't," he said. Even as a farmer himself, he found the numbers scattered and hard to find: "I'm a farmer myself and I never knew all the details, everything was scattered."
The moment they didn't wait
Kennedy didn't petition a farm body or hire a developer. One morning, before his day job, he asked AI to build the tool himself. "I was up at 5am this morning, working on it between 5am and 7am before I went to work." By the time he got home that evening, a basic version of the site already existed, built with Claude and ChatGPT, described in the coverage as "vibe-coding."
The site now aggregates factory and mart pricing, live and free for any farmer to check. It drew almost 2,000 views in its first three days, and farmers from across Ireland have been messaging him with questions and ideas. Kennedy spent nothing to build it and makes nothing from it. His stated aim is simply to "bring some daylight to beef pricing" and "provide transparency for the whole industry."
"The factories know exactly what every farmer is getting paid. Farmers don't. This site, this app, changes that."
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