A phone app developed by AgResearch to help New Zealand dairy farmers find the best way to control giant buttercup in their pastures has found a new use on the fairways of golf courses in North Carolina.
The Grassland Cover Estimator phone app was launched by AgResearch in February to give farmers a simple way to quantify how badly the unpalatable, invasive pest has infested their pastures. A companion web app can then recommend which of nearly 50 herbicides would be the best weapon against the weed.
AgReseach principal scientist Graeme Bourdot says the phone app has already been downloaded more than 400 times, both in NZ and globally, and the companion web app has attracted similar attention.
“It’s a pretty cool little tool,” Bourdot says.
“A dairy farmer can grab the app, walk across the paddock, get the percentage of giant buttercup cover and then put that number into the web app to decide which herbicide is the best option and if indeed that’s going to be profitable.”
While the companion apps were developed specifically to assist farmers dealing with giant buttercup, the phone tool works with any plant and is attracting plenty of attention, some of it from outside the dairy industry.
“Fonterra are interested in using it to measure the amount of clover in a pasture and another group of dairy farmers are interested in using it to measure plantain because they have to show that at least 30% of their pasture is in plantain,” he says.
“And now the pig industry, who have to show that the amount of bare ground in their paddocks is less than a certain minimum level for their farm environment plans (FEPs), are interested in using it to measure that.
“The thing’s kind of snowballed in terms of interest out there, so I’m pleased we made it a generic tool. We developed it for this particular giant buttercup project but you can set up any sort of project in it you want.”
While the interest shown by NZ farmers outside Golden Bay where giant buttercup is a significant issue was gratifying, Bourdot says he was surprised to hear that greenkeepers on golf courses in the US had also seen it’s potential.
They heard about it from North Carolina State University weed scientist Professor Joe Neal who spent last summer in NZ working with Bourdot to formally evaluate the app’s precision and accuracy.
He’s since returned to the US but the pair keep in touch, working together on a scientific paper about the app.
“He phoned me the other day and said the greenkeepers in North Carolina are really interested in using this app because they have to keep the weeds down to below 5% of the total pasture and this would show their manager they’ve achieved that goal,” he says.
“It’s surprising how many people out there with various sorts of pastures and grassy areas have a requirement to measure the cover of different elements.”
Now Bourdot has turned his attention to another weed, nassella tussock, also unpalatable to stock and highly invasive. Nassella can be found on sites throughout NZ but is worst on North Canterbury hill country where back in the 1940s, it covered thousands of hectares and it took gangs of workers armed with grubbers to bring it under control.
Grubbing is still the principal method of control and it’s compulsory for landowners to grub out any nassella plants they see in spring, when it flowers and is easiest to identify.
But not all farmers take well to being told they have to grub the weed and that can be a source of conflict between them and the regulating authority Environment Canterbury (ECan). So Bourdot’s team at AgResearch have come up with a tool to show farmers what will likely happen, depending on whether they grub as instructed if they fail to take action.
“We built the model based on a decade’s worth of data and published that and then we thought this model’s capable of so much more,” says Bourdot, who’s spent much of his scientific career studying nassella.
“Now a web app has been developed with nice graphs that enable you to simulate what will happen for a given farm with a given starting population if you don’t do any grubbing over the next 50 years. And if I grub it the way ECan says I have to, what will the result be?”
The app hasn’t been released yet, but Bourdot believes it could be a valuable tool for the regional council to show farmers the value of keeping on top of the potentially devastating weed.
“Here’s a scientific model that tells us if you stop grubbing now, this is what your farm is going to look like in 25 or 50 years, and this is what the impact will be on your neighbour,” he says.
