Why a dairy farmer developed an app
Many pasture management programmes are severely limited in their approach for allowing users to do what they want with their own data. To simplify, most pasture management programmes don’t allow the farmer to make their own decisions, don’t allow the farmer to make the best decisions and ultimately don’t allow the farmer to graze their paddocks and feed their cows in one easy platform. This daily decision making may be second nature to the most experienced of pasture grazing farmers, but it still adds to the mental burden of daily decision making.
This is why I embarked on the journey of developing the pasture management web application Pasture.io.
It all started in 2005 when my father, Bruce, and uncle, Max, made me responsible for organising where our herd of milking cows would graze. This task mainly involved rotating cows around the farm in a clockwise fashion with requirements being that the close paddocks were reserved for night time grazings so the person herding the cows early in the morning wouldn’t have to wake so early. This is what I would call rotational grazing in its simplest form.
Through 2005, my uncle helped me develop a filemaker database for recording the date that each paddock was grazed and the amount of grazings taken off each paddock. This helped us keep a check on the rotation length, or time since each paddock was grazed, which is important to maintain grazing at the appropriate leaf stage. This also meant we had a digital record and was leaps and bounds ahead of recording into a pocket note book due to the quick and easiness of reporting the grazing rotation.
Through this time, my inquisitive demeanour was starting to take a choker hold of our grazing management and this is ultimately when I started asking questions.
How do you know how much pasture is in a paddock? How do you know how much pasture you’re feeding your cows? How do you know how much pasture a cow can consume? Why do you measure all other aspects on farm except your pasture?
And wait for it, because this is the big one.
Why isn’t there a pasture management application that combines grazing pasture and feeding cows?
By 2006, I had discovered rising plate meters, which are essentially a tool that measures the height of the pasture sward or what is called a pasture cover and converts this height into a biomass reading of kilograms of dry matter per hectare (KgDM/ha). This brought on the advent of Pastoral Mastoral, my self-acclaimed pasture management spreadsheet or what was to become Pasture.io’s minimal viable product. From the rising plate meter, we collected individual paddock covers, from which we then calculated individual paddock growth rates. From these metrics, we could confidently forecast one to two weeks worth of grazings before we were required to measure the farm’s pasture covers again.
After three years of measuring the farm once a week to every two weeks, I was growing desperate for another option — one that would mean I could kick back and be lazier. Well no, not really, but an option that would reduce the physical labour effort in what had become an important component of our family dairy farm. By mid-2009, I purchased one of the first C-Dax Pasture Meters in Tasmania, which has meant that the rising plate meter is packed away for good. Our confidence with the consistency of the C-Dax Pasture Meter over that of the rising plate meter is high, and the new tool has meant that we can now quickly measure 140 hectares in a little over two hours of good going.
This new pasture meter meant that we were now measuring the farm every 5–8 days all year round, but most importantly it meant that we were capturing a lot more data. This data capture started to make us feel that we weren’t making the most of it in the spreadsheet. This is the spreadsheet that I started building in 2006 and by 2014 it was so complex and bewildering that simple functions such as a feed wedge were starting to fail.
This meant our data that we were capturing (now on average every eight days) for the last ten years was being underutilised.
By the end of 2014, and after realising that the industry was still lacking a pasture management application that allowed us to make our own decisions with our own data and didn’t dictate a management style to us, I decided to develop Pasture.io.
You can join the pasture management revolution at http://pasture.io, an app developed for farmers by farmers.
