AS A barrage of regulatory changes require farmers to reassess land use on parts of their farm, the Hyperfarm mapping tool has been developed to help give them an idea of what those options are, and how their farm will look if they choose those options.
The technology is due for release to a select group of users in June, but Seth Laurenson says developers and scientists have been working closely with farmers and iwi groups for two years on it.
“The aim has been to develop a tool that gives them an accessible, user-friendly and holistic overview, rather than the nitty-gritty of data relating to nitrogen loss for example,” Laurenson said.
“It is already a pretty crowded space for those sorts of tools.”
The prompt for Hyperfarm came when Laurenson was involved in Canterbury’s community group consultations on water use.
Despite the best intentions of the collaborative approach, the multiple streams of expert knowledge from the likes of hydrologists and soil scientists risked alienating many lay people, including farmers.
“We wanted farmers to be able to visualise what the land use changes they may have to make would look like,” he said.
“Modelling off specific parameters can deliver a textbook solution to issues that often does not fit with the practical realities of running a farm.”
One farmer they worked with used Hyperfarm to virtually plant trees along a fence line, but had found they would interfere with his line of sight to his lambing paddocks he liked to see from the house.
The tool has proven effective in getting farmers to engage at a more emotional, holistic and practical level with the changes they may make to land use, in turn taking some of the “fear factor” out of moving to the unknown.
“And many farmers already carry much of the information in their heads, this enables them to get it down visually,” he said.
Trial farmer clients have also provided a dashboard of future priorities to developers about what they are seeking in their future farm, including employment options, nutrient loss control and forestry opportunities, among others.
The online tool has a farm’s imagery loaded into it, sourced from LINZ mapping data, with the ability to modify and edit layers of that imagery to customise it further.
“And existing land use can be picked up from satellite images,” Laurenson said.
The tool allows farmers to pull up a variety of alternative land use options, ranging across arable crops, horticulture and forestry. But the realism of future options has been significantly improved by a “tool within the tool.”
“We have gathered billions of data points from all over the world, specific to different crops and the growing conditions that best suit them, right down to varieties within crops,” he said.
Hyperfarm incorporates those options into its decision options and is capable of revealing a number of crop options to farmers they may not have otherwise considered.
Such predictive ability offers some exciting potential for farmer groups to collectively scale up on a crop that otherwise may only remain a cottage-scale offering.
“You could take Hyperfarm on your laptop to the pub, sit down with your neighbours and between you see how much of this crop you could grow, where you could look at processing it and really drill into something none of you may have considered before,” he said.
Laurenson says the value of this struck him at a FAR open day.
“I had a younger farmer say to me, ‘look, I will grow anything, just tell me what to grow, where, and I will’,” he said.
The preciseness will extend beyond simply offering apples, pears and nectarines as an option.
“It is capable of saying of those three crops, apples would be the best, from an environmental, financial or even lifestyle perspective,” he said.
The team started off with a long list of land use alternatives for farmers to load in, but have since refined it to a more select set of options. However, Laurenson says future versions will probably be broadened out to include more pioneering land uses like tourism options, exotic berry types and more grain crops.
The AgResearch team are keen to see Hyperfarm used, while also delivering a level of commercial return that makes the tool sustainable.
“We are keen to see it out there with users, without us needing to look over their shoulder,” he said.
