NZ farmer utilising satellite mapping for pasture monitoring

A dairy farmer in New Zealand spoke about making the most of home-grown forage and ways he is embracing technology to farm more efficiently in a session at this year's virtual Dairy Tech conference. Dairy farmer Andrew Hoggard recently began using satellite mapping technology to monitor grass covers on his farm in Feilding, which is situated in the Manawatu district of the North Island in New Zealand.Making the most of home-grown forage has long been a focus for Mr Hoggard, and he believes embracing the technology to do so more efficiently is only set to become more important to the sector.Speaking in session looking at different worldwide grazing perspectives, he discussed how his approach to pasture management had moved with the times. This has seen him progress from originally using a plate metre on what was the 180 hectare farm, that has since grown to 300ha, to a tow behind pasture meter for a time before introducing the LIC pastures from space technology most recently. Daily imagesMr Hoggard explained that the satellite tool works by taking daily images to provide kg DM/ha figures which display alongside a coloured-coded satellite map of the farm on-screen, scaling from ‘no pasture' to ‘abundant pasture'. "I have long taken the approach that you cannot manage what you do not measure," Mr Hoggard said. "Over time my approach to measuring grass has moved in-line with technology availability."Particularly as the farm size grew, it became a time-consuming task to get around the grazing platform and would take about two days to walk the whole farm. "With the tow behind tool on the quad we got this down to one day, but at busy times of the year like calving, taking one day out to measure pasture was still getting put on the back burner at times."Now with the mapping technology I can check figures instantly and I am now able to spend less time gathering information and more time analysing it." AccuracyThat said, Mr Hoggard explained that he will still go out to paddocks and ‘grown-truth' some of the numbers for greater accuracy. He said: "Cloud cover can impact on the satellites ability to give an accurate reading so we might go to check the kg DM/ha number it is giving before grazing a paddock. "The satellite reading might be 100kg DM/ha over or under, for example, to what it is actually is, so we then decide on whether supplement is needed or not from there."More recently the technology has upgraded to giving estimated pasture cover figures if cloud cover is preventing images from being taken, which model numbers based on the last picture to give expected growth rates, but far more accurate figures come with the pictures."The key thing is that the order of covers in paddocks it provides are correct, so mapping which order the cows are to graze paddocks is easily done." Embracing technologyMr Hoggard also talked about embracing technology more generally on-farm. He believed doing so was becoming increasingly crucial to modern day farmers being able to juggle the multiple roles that more people were taking on, using his current role as president of the Federated Farmers of New Zealand, the countries NFU equivalent, as an example.Like many units, technology uptake on his farm has been gradual and Mr Hoggard highlighted areas like automation technology in the parlour, tank monitoring and flow metres as well as numerous cloud-based farm software packages he has embraced over the years in-a-bid to improve efficiencies on-farm. But he felt there were a number of technology concerns which could be improved upon or developed to help farmers in the future. He said: "More integrated programmes that share data is a big one for me.