LIC now has more than 1000 dairy farmer clients using newly developed satellite technology to ‘platemeter’ their paddocks from space, delivering an emailed report to them on a weekly basis.
Wayne McNee, LIC chief executive, said interest from farmers at this year’s Mystery Creek Fieldays was strong. The SPACE service has managed to penetrate 10% of the country’s dairy farms in the relatively short time since its launch in December.
Typically farmers can spend at least half a day using a platemeter to record pasture data, and the crucial early spring period is often when they have the least time to do it over the entire farm.
Firmly in place in Canterbury, the satellite system now extends to Waikato.
SPACE business unit manager Rebecca Dalrymple said New Zealand brings its own challenges for satellite evaluation, including variances in farm contour, pasture type and cloud cover.
“But the latest satellite technology is well ahead of that which was first trialled a few years ago. We are able to achieve a far higher level of resolution with the latest generation.”
Earlier LIC trials had also included using drones and light planes, but there were complications around drone use within line of sight, technology and cost issues.
The satellite project is a joint venture between LIC and Californian satellite company Planet Labs with LIC holding the IP on the pasture analyse technology that translates the images into pasture drymatter data for farmers.
Data is presented to farmers as a ranked feed wedge with estimated pasture drymatter levels.
Planet Lab put 88 micro-wave sized CubeSat miniature satellites into orbit late last year, and now has the largest fleet of satellites in space.
The satellites are launched into orbit travelling as a secondary payload to larger rocket missions, helping keep their cost down.
Dalrymple said farmers trialling the system had said the results of the satellite estimates were “surprisingly accurate.”
She said this did much to validate the work that went on behind the scenes, at this stage on a farm-by-farm basis, with individual images having to be checked manually against a digitised farm image, to ensure clarity and image quality.
“Ultimately we aim to see this being done automatically.”
One issue still being resolved was the accuracy of the estimates at very high pasture levels, something LIC technicians were fine-tuning.
“The challenge is that in NZ every farm is quite different, with varying contour and grass species that can appear quite differently in images.”
Increasingly time-short farmers were often short on having skilled staff to assess pastures, with variable results not uncommon with plating samples taken.
“For the cost of $1000-$3000 a year, the results are regular, and consistent in terms of assessment,” Dalrymple said.
McNee said the high-altitude reporting has potential to link through to other pools of on-farm data, including hooking into farm production data to better understand what paddocks are the most productive, and highlighting those that may require focused pasture or fertility attention.
The company is joint venture partner with Fonterra Farm Source in its AgriGate data pooling business and McNee said there was potential for other partners to come on board to augment the data collected.
The potential for seamless and powerful data flows also becomes more real once this data links into LIC’s work developing in-line milk sensors that can record milksolids data, doing away with traditional herd testing sampling methods.
