Rewarding farmers who embrace sustainability
Winners of DairyNZ’s Sustainability and Stewardship awards in the Ballance Farm Environment Awards have their eyes firmly fixed on progressing a positive future for New Zealand dairy.
The app incorporates DairyNZ’s ‘Body Condition Scoring Made Easy’ field guide and allows BCS on cows using a smartphone.
Animal husbandry specialist Andrea Henry says DairyNZ looked at other apps available and decided none had everything farmers were saying they wanted. So it created its own.
“The idea of the app is to help farmers get better and more consistent at scoring their animals,” says Henry. “Using this app, when you are scoring animals you will be more accurate. And you are more likely to do it often because it’s easier.”
DairyNZ’s field guide has been built into the app so users can compare the field guide’s pictures to the cows in front of them.
She says feedback from farmers showed how important it was to be able to compare a visual guide to the real cows in the paddock.
“But what farmer has the Body Condition Scoring Made Easy field guide with them 24/7?
“But they do have their smartphones with them – it’s rare these days for people to be away from their phone. You’ve literally got the information at your fingertips.”
The app enables a farmer to follow a cow’s progress through the season and to graph the progress of the entire herd.
The app can flag cows and enter their identification numbers into the phone.
“Let’s say you drive past a cow and see it is lame or you see three cows in heat. That’s fine, but can you remember which cows they are? Now you can act immediately.”
The entire herd can be identified on the app via their individual IDs. The information gathered by the app on any particular cow can then easily be emailed on.
DairyNZ brand marketing manager Andrew Fraser says the BCS app follows DairyNZ’s other app, its farm dairy effluent calculator, but he’s expecting the BCS app to be even more popular.
“The dairy effluent calculator is something you do every once in a while; this new one is going to be used all the time.”
The development of more on-farm apps is inevitable, and a pasture assessment app will probably be the next one to be made available after the BCS app, he says.
“Now farmers have a computer in their pocket, we can give them a tool to help them make decisions when they are out and about. Our job is to provide a tool that is nice and intuitive and adds value to their day in these tight times.”
Farmers can download the new free app from the Apple or Android app stores from June 10. Farmers can also find out more about how to use the new app at DairyNZ’s stand.
