Dairy farmer Nigel Taylor’s Job Done application, a workforce management and productivity app that allows farmers to track their workers’ location in real-time using GPS, was judged the best pitch for innovative ways to improve dairy farm productivity in the first Fonterra Activate pitching process.
The guidelines included new ways of farmers communicating with Fonterra, automation of essential farm tasks and decision-making, better use of farm data, recruiting staff and sourcing farm inputs, easier compliance and facilitating professional relationships.
Seven proposals were selected for a day-long presentation held in Auckland, when Fonterra staff members and invited farmers got to evaluate the concepts and products.
Taylor won, and was offered an ongoing business relationship with Fonterra’s Farm Source division with the aim of commercialising the innovation.
His app helps with health and safety compliance and replaces the need for paperwork such as timesheets.
After coming up with the concept, Taylor worked with IT architect Srinivasa Rao Munagala to build the app and was mentored by the Icehouse in Auckland while developing a business plan.
Taylor said multiple farms and corporate ownership that he was involved in had created the need for centralised tasking, reporting and monitoring that wasn’t available on a dairy industry-specific digital platform, so he built one.
Employees would sign on, receive direction, talk to each other, share information and, most importantly, sign out at the end of the day.
“There is nothing worse than not knowing an employee has been injured or delayed out on the farm and could be needing help in the middle of the night.
“With Job Done employers will know that they are safe, or can initiate a search.”
Taylor said contractors coming on to farms would be briefed and their hours and job progress monitored.
“Another problem is the owner or manager not knowing how long the contractor has spent on a job until the invoice turns up, when it is too late to query.”
Taylor hoped to have a prototype app available for evaluation by farmers soon.
That process would quantify the numbers and demonstrate the productivity claims made.
His concept, hosted in the cloud and accessed by smartphones and tablets, caught the imagination of dairy farmers.
One of the first to see it was sharemilker Olin Greenan, who said it was really tough onfarm at present but that didn’t mean farmers should give up looking for productivity improvements.
“More instant information and data available will definitely help me run a more efficient operation.
“Some of the really important things such as compliance, environmental and employment regulations take a lot of time to track and manage. Time is very precious for farmers.”
Fonterra’s director of co-operative affairs Miles Hurrell said the company hadn’t put a lot of time and money into the Activate search.
“The app promoters have funded their own products and development and sought outside assistance from Icehouse, Spark Ventures and BBDO.
“Their intellectual property to this point remains with them, and anything jointly developed with Fonterra belonged to Fonterra with the first right of refusal to develop further.
“Our brief was simple – look for new ways to help farmers with their businesses by reducing input costs, improving profitability and saving time.
“Fonterra Activate was to explore solutions that deliver benefits to all co-operative farms, quickly and cost-effectively, and we hope to repeat the exercise at regular intervals.”
Farm Source director Jason Minkhorst said his company couldn’t stay out of the technology market because the milk price was low.
“Our IT specialists are very conscious of the demands on farmers’ time, the use of computers and tiredness.
“But if these new apps are no harder to use than internet banking, well and good.”
Another entrant was Old Yellow, by Barrie Deidrichs and Maximum Ellison, with a pair of apps called Feedler and Options.
Feedler was an easy-to-use cow feed mix calculator to find the optimum feed quality and price based on data from dairying regions.
It was developed with input from Deidrichs’ brother who managed 1300 cows in barns in Southland and with optimal feeding was able to increase milk output from 1.85kg milksolids (MS)/cow/day at peak to 2.2kg MS while at the same time saving $80,000 a year.
Savings of just 50c/cow/day would build to those sorts of annual numbers, Deidrichs said.
The programme was twinned with Options, an electronic reverse auction for farmers seeking inputs like feed, fertiliser, insurance, power and fuel.
The Farmsense app monitors a range of critical farm signals, milk vat, water source, effluent ponds, farm dairy machinery and temperature sensors through the cooling chain.
With a detailed history of the condenser performance, for instance, alerts could be sent to the supplier or mechanic, Sensapps principal Vinoo Jacob said.
Fonterra would be able to aggregate data at a higher level for information on energy use patterns for the industry and the district, and then programme tanker movements.
Sensapps already has customers in the hospitality trade for refrigeration monitoring.
Craigmore Farming and Sustainable offshoot Map of Agriculture was into online benchmarking for clients of rural professionals.
Craigmore Farming had 21 dairy farms and was branching out into the United Kingdom with the Sustainable business, Ben Groundwater said.
Its drive was for more efficiency in production through sharing farm results.
Fertiliser industry stalwart Bert Quin teamed up with mechanical engineer Geoff Bates to tackle nitrate leaching with products from a company called Pastoral Robotics.
It consists of an ATV tow-behind spiked roller to detect recent urine paths and spray a combination of urease inhibitor and gibberellic acid.
They said the product, Orun, promised 50% reduction in nitrates and 30% in nitrous oxide.
Pastoral Robotics has also developed the software to drive a small 4WD battery-powered robotic vehicle to follow pre-programmed pathways on farm paddocks.
Quin and Bates said the robotics would also lead to further onfarm uses, including soil fertility and moisture assessment, pasture and crop growth and quality assessment, and precision application of nutrients.
Southland-developed AgriMap showed its Agri360 software for farm management based on an interactive farm map plus job and order tasking, compliance, monitoring, paddock withholding periods, and reporting.
It was already available commercially on monthly subscription, company principals Paul Ruddenklau and Andy Lowe said.
It was being used across 400,000ha and in 18 countries.
There were no barriers to uptake by farmers at about $1/day cost, with all information stored in the cloud, Lowe said.
Users could load in their own categories and develop new applications.
Spark Ventures entered its Qrious prototype application for pasture growth modelling.
It uses data from farm-level sensors and external sources to generate a pasture growth curve for farmers and their advisers.
