Using farm software has significantly reduced costs for New Zealand Pastures and gives them good real-time information at their fingertips.
New Zealand Pastures got to know the FarmIQ software when they used it as part of a lamb trial for the Red Meat Profit Partnership programme, recalls the company’s commercial officer Greg Campbell. “We could see the benefit of putting all the farms on.” The last one got set up in July 2016. The corporate farming business finishes up to 300,000 lambs a year as well as 6000 beef cattle on five dryland properties in Canterbury and Otago.
One place for farm information
“We did look around, but we found that no other farm management software had as many features as FarmIQ,” says Greg. “It has something for everything we wanted. You can use it to manage stock moving on and off properties and tracking weights, as well as to record pasture maintenance, fertiliser and spraying, and also animal health and supplementary feeds – right down to managing what products we have on hand. It ticked all the boxes. It’s a one-stop shop.
Easy to use
“Also, the user interface is very simple and logical so we could see it would be relatively easy to introduce. It appears to have been built from the farm up, rather than from the accounting side – so it makes more sense to the guys on the ground.” The company has an accounting package too, and they find it easy to transfer information from FarmIQ, he says.
Reducing costs and increasing accuracy
Using the FarmIQ software has made “a huge difference” at the corporate management level, Greg reports. Farm managers are recording information as they go and then it’s available for the company to use for a range of reports for weekly, monthly and annual reporting cycles. This has vastly reduced costs. “It’s taken out three or four steps”.
It has also improved accuracy for reports like stock reconciliations.
Real-time information
Information is immediately available for decision-making, he says. For example, farm managers can set weight targets for mobs and then as they record weights these will show progress in real time. “The managers can see the progress and management can see it too – we are both looking at same screen at same time. That’s a great thing about it being cloud-based.”
Good visuals
The reporting is very helpful, he says. “It is easy to run reports and see the information you want right in front of you and understand it. That’s been a big plus. Everything is graphically displayed. It’s better than looking at a set of figures. An example is fertiliser – which is a significant percentage of our spend each year. Now we are better able to target the fertiliser spend on areas of the farm.”
Continuing development
FarmIQ staff are working with New Zealand Pastures to help them achieve their goals, he says. “We have regular meetings. They discuss new things coming in and what we would get value out of. And they’ve been very open in asking how they could do things better. That’s been very helpful.”
Greg is keen to see their business partners get involved with FarmIQ too. “The more parties involved, the stronger it gets and the more value there is to the users.
“The more we use it the more uses we find for it. We are learning every month – so come back to us in a year!”
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