Gareth Yoder

Gareth Yoder is a technology lead and co-owner of Cedar Meadow Meats, a farm retail business in Elverson, Pennsylvania. He was a financial-services technical lead in 2020 and a cash program technical lead at Vanguard in 2024. He is a Penn State alumnus.

From cattle sensors to farm retail

Yoder and Joy Yoder first explored using cattle activity data to spot signs of illness. They strapped a smartphone to a steer and recorded video to compare its movements with sensor readings. Yoder reported that his algorithm recognized activities with around 85% accuracy in that experiment. The proposed system would have sent motion data to the cloud for processing; the experiment did not establish that it could diagnose illness.

They developed a business plan, worked with Penn State Berks TestLab and obtained grant funding for customer discovery. Hardware costs and competition from well-funded companies made the sensor product difficult to pursue. At an industry event, they also heard about growing consumer interest in knowing where food comes from. They shifted toward selling beef directly from Joy’s family farm, and Yoder built the website for Cedar Meadow Meats’ launch in 2020.

Selling cattle in shares brought its own practical problem: a whole animal had to be sold even when customers wanted only a quarter. Joy promoted the business through a Facebook video and a roadside sign, while the pair used shared documents to track inquiries, orders and payments. Yoder planned to gather customer feedback before deciding how to improve the buying process.

Cedar Meadow Meats now sells beef and pork by the cut and in freezer shares, along with monthly beef shares. It is a division of Cedar Meadow Livestock, whose family farm has raised cattle, hogs and crops since Joy’s grandfather bought the farmstead in 1955.