A farm management system to enable objective benchmarking is finally coming to the grazing industry.
Maia Grazing is a software package for the farm office and perhaps its most obvious benefit, even for the least tech-savvy farmer, is to match feed potential and seasonal trends with stocking rate, providing an objective guide to approaching drought and destocking decisions.
The platform is fed with measurements of an individual farm’s pasture characteristics and over time the software “learns” how the property converts rainfall into feed.
At the output end, liveweight gains are measured and can be assessed against the pasture growth to provide graziers the information to make objective decisions about cell grazing and destocking.
The new agtech product does not come in response to significant demand from producers, but it is the first production management and decision making software system that is comparable to offerings in other industries such as cropping and dairy.
Cropping and dairy are well served with products to closely monitor input and production data, with software incorporating production predictions based on past output and forecast climate inputs.
On the other hand, grazing has tended to measure production elements one-by-one and as a result, pastures are yet to benefit from the predictive tools.
Maia Grazing, which launched at University of New England’s Smart Farm in Armidale this week, convened a seminar where a herd of expert speakers highlighted that data capture was essential for effective, profit-based decision making.
Australian Farm Institute executive director Mick Keogh pointed out that data for input and production in dairy and cropping are more easily monitored than grazing.
Wheat grades or milk fat benchmarks are relatively easily monitored. Cropping inputs come at the start of the season and are assessed by the harvest. Dairy’s constant production cycle creates a feedback loop which encourages a focus on constant focus on objective performance measurement.
“Generally speaking, livestock isn’t like that. It’s characterised by highly variable inputs,” Mr Keogh said, pointing to the wide variance in pasture performance and complexity of cattle quality measurements.
Mr Keogh is the man at the centre of the Precision to Decision nationwide project to survey producers and support industries about digital technology opportunities and challenges.
He said the fact that a private company was first to produce a commercial grazing offering was a sign of Australia’s maturing digital agriculture market.
“The systems that have gained momentum in the U.S aren’t publicly funded, commercial players are much better positioned to deliver these products” Mr Keogh said.
“They do draw heavily on public sector data sets and research, but they rely very much on commercial software developers that understand user interfaces. Research and development corporations and government agencies shouldn’t be doing that work.”
R&D corporations and agencies such as CSIRO should make their work available to private companies, such as the Grains Research and Development Corporation's National Variety Trials that measured crop performance in locations across the country.
Maia Grazing is open to collaboration with third party providers, which are encouraged to develop complementary products that can plug information into its platform. One prospective opportunity is for the Pastures From Space, CSIRO’s satellite-based pasture performance measurement tool.
But in the more advanced U.S market, production management systems are utilised across the supply chain, from suppliers, to producers and bulk handlers and marketers.
This allows the cost of development and operation of the data management and storage to be spread, whereas producer-only offering relies on the farmer for its profits.
Mr Keogh said the most successful systems in the U.S deliver benefits to multiple players in the supply chain.
“For example, cropping sector services are delivered by a seed or chemical supplier, which gives them an advantage in their inventory management while the farmer gets the advantage of the insights provided.
“The holy grail is a system that provides value across supply chain as well as on farm. That is where you can see the products being commercially viable.
Mr Keogh said in Australia, a grazing value chain could benefit from a systems that allows producers to quickly and easily integrity requirements (National Livestock Identification System, individual company accreditation requirements such as Coles Graze and so on) while retailers would benefit from cheaper traceability of products, which is increasingly enticing as Australia looks to value-based marketing of produce.