Canterbury Farmer Builds on 160 Years of Dairy Legacy
Gareth Hale is the current custodian of a 160-year legacy that saw his great grandfather dairying in Taranaki since the mid-1850s and grandfather dairying in the Waikato from the early 1900s.
Available for customer registration, the Milk Sustainability Centre is described as an innovative digital ecosystem that integrates agronomic and animal performance into one unified platform. Dairy farmers can use the system to monitor nutrient use efficiency (NUE) and carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) across their farm, herd and paddocks, while also collecting animal and agronomic data to help manage nutrient utilisation effectively, while at the same time reducing the chore of manual data input.
While helping to increase productivity, the system will also enable users to address the needs of dairy processors, retailers, and consumers more broadly. In future, users will be able to benchmark the data and use recommendations to make real-time changes that provide for an increase in productivity and a reduction in CO2 emissions.
Developed and powered by Dutch company Dairy Data Warehouse BV (DDW), who have around 11 years of experience in providing ‘data solutions for sustainable dairy farming’, the Centre will help integrate machinery, milking equipment, and herd management software solutions into one platform.
The cloud-based platform integrates agronomic data from the John Deere Operations Centre and animal data from the DeLaval system, allowing third part consultants, nutritionists and agronomists to provide wide ranging recommendations to the farmer.
Lars Bergmann, DeLaval, explains: “Currently, dairy farming involves using multiple unconnected software solutions, so the Milk Sustainability Centre brings these together to deliver a tool where farmers can save money and improve their sustainability efforts.
www.milksustainabilitycenter.com
