Connecting the clever farm

Are you excited by the new technology that will be avaliable to farmers once the rural broadband network is rolled out?

Much negativety has been expressed about the cost of the NIAT tags but is this just an opportunity to identify the best and worst performers in the flock or herd. Farm advisors tell us there is a huge difference between the best and worst farm managers and maybe that difference will be seen by those that use the data avaliable to them.

The Focus and Monitor farm system being used by Beef and Lamb NZ to promote and publicise best practice, starts with an indepth analysis of existing data. Technology such as promoted in this article, and  individual animal tags will make this job easy, and allow farmers to only farm the most efficent animals.

Some farmers believe to earn more profit they need to get bigger while others look to increase the efficency of their operation. Investing in technology could be a much cheaper way to improve profits than buying more land.

From his high country sheep station at the headwaters of the Rangitata gorge, Don Aubrey is 55km from the nearest town and 105km from a city.He can remember carting merino wool to Timaru, 70km away, to sell at auction, where if a grower struck bad luck 12 months of work would be near wasted.But through adopting and adapting to new technology, Don now has more of a hand in his own fortune reports The NZ Herald.From an armchair in South Canterbury, he can follow a wool auction in Melbourne via satellite and track the prices other growers are getting for their lots."If we think the market is where we want it, I send an email through to the selling company and off we go."

This level of connectivity and the ability of farmers to access real-time information is becoming the lifeblood of agriculture in the 21st century.David Walker, rural market manager at information and communication technology company Gen-i and a former dairy farmer from the Taranaki, said those who can gather data and use it to make productivity gains will be the sector's most successful in the coming years. With the Government's rural broadband initiative set to begin in July, more farmers will have the opportunity to collect and process elaborate sets of information.

Aubrey described how by combining market prices with the quantity and quality of wool expected from each sheep, he could work out which animals were worth keeping.This data was stored on a computer database and linked to each animal through a radio tag."You can assess all of your young stock, you can walk down a whole line of sheep with a magic wand, recording tags and at the end of it, it will tell you exactly which sheep [has the quality of wool you're after]," Aubrey said.

Walker stressed the future was not just about the gathering and analysis of data, but the sharing of it with those who buy agricultural goods.He said pilot programmes were under way for meat processing plants to see in real time the amount and weight of stock on farms.
"If those meat companies can see [this information] and work with the growers, they can say, 'You've got 100 animals over 200kg, how about we pull them from the farm, we've got a marketplace for them'," he said.

From July 1, Telecom and Vodafone will begin building a rural broadband network, giving 86 per cent of rural homes and businesses the internet speeds their urban counterparts now enjoy.The Government announced last week it will partner with the telcos in the rural broadband initiative, due to be rolled out over the next six years.Telecom will lay 3100km of fibre cables throughout rural New Zealand and Vodafone will build 154 cell towers providing both fixed-wireless and mobile internet.As well as this, Telecom will upgrade its copper internet lines, giving 30 per cent of rural internet users speeds of up to 20 megabits per second.Gen-i's David Walker said the scheme will enable more farmers to adopt new types of technology that will change the way they run their operations.