Feedback from its 2000-plus farmer clients quickly showed they want duplication and compliance problems tackled, chief executive Emma Parsons said.
“We had always intended to deal with that at some stage but it became clear that was the most pressing priority, even more so than the performance insights and benchmarking available to users.”
So Agrigate has progressed from just data inputs and decision tools to data exchange.
Agrigate has enabled for the first time in the dairy industry a digital representation of dairy farms on one platform, including their inputs, outputs, weather, pasture and employment records, management decisions, financials and genetics.
Founding partners Fonterra and LIC, both co-operatives with overlapping farmer-shareholder bases, are building the platform for the good of the industry.
While similar platforms are being built in dairying elsewhere in the world they aren’t owned and developed co-operatively so rely on fees and subscriptions.
Other commercially owned agricultural databases want to sell the data mining opportunities, she said.
Individual farmers can have several different profiles and management regimes, such as multiple herds, calving seasons, farm dairies, milking times, vats, animal health programmes and reproduction plans.
All that complexity has to be accurately captured and made meaningful for benchmarking and data sharing, with permission of the farmer-owner.
“We have enabled farmers to bring groups of their data together and share it with their rural professionals instead of having to be collated and put in each time.
“Everybody is welcome on Agrigate and we want to have as many partners as we can, sharing data around the industry.
“The role for Agrigate is powering up the agritech sector to avoid unnecessary competition and wasted investment.
“Once everyone’s systems can talk to each other there are a lot of benefits to be had in regulatory compliance, for example, or validating product claims in the marketplace.
“Connecting the data sets is fundamental to unlocking those benefits.”
Parsons said the primary sector already has written and implemented farm data standards, the farm data code of practice and the data linker for connectivity.
But that relationships work did not establish a data lake like Agrigate and its partners.
“Not only do we now have the lake being filled but we are building great data science and applications to mine that data for insights.”
Agrigate has multiple levels of farm data and operates in real time, as distinct from Dairybase’s historical financial data.
Parsons likened the concept to the London tube map, where information flows in all directions.
“We will greatly reduce the expense of partners sending data to one another.”
Agrigate is free to Fonterra and LIC farmers and available at $15 a month for multi-farm users.
Farmer users can build up their own benchmarking reference group of like farms in a district, at the same management level, once-a-day milking, etc.
Entities in the primary sector are all going through digital transformation and into cloud-based applications at the same time and there are hiccups along the way but nothing that Agrigate has experienced on its own.
“We have a really engaged group of users so if someone’s cow numbers are wrong we hear about it pretty quickly.”
Agrigate has 13 full-time staff equivalents and is building its platform and services quickly though Fonterra and LIC are asking if more progress can be made, Parsons said.
What about the remaining 80% of dairy farmers who are not yet using Agrigate?
“Farmers will adopt good technology that solves their problems.
“When we have a digital ecosystem that avoids duplication and removes barriers to use farmers will join.”
The next development will be the ability to auto-populate the Dairy Diary from MINDA data from the new season.
Agrigate will also be launching PaySauce and Farmax as partners.
