Boosting Crop Production by Spreading Effluent
Tararua district farmer Jamie Harris milks around 400 cows using a split calving system on his farm, Crossdale Dairies.
Tag IT Technologies Ltd was one of seven companies displaying their latest offering at Fonterra’s head office this month during Activate 2.0, a competition organised by Fonterra to promote onfarm innovation.
According to Tag IT, the Halo system is a service to help farmers primarily measure, monitor and manage their effluent systems. Halo monitors conditions such as storage pond level, application amounts, pump and stirrer status. It sends alerts to a cellphone, smart phone or computer if a preset condition exceeds a limit or a fault occurs; it reports status directly to a cellphone, smart phone or computer.
A website and key information shows graphs and statistics for analysis.
Farmers have command and control through their phone or a web dashboard, with local controls onfarm as a backup.
The company says Halo gives farmers peace of mind by alerting them when a pond nears freeboard levels.
“The days of setting up an irrigator and then going back to the pump to turn it on are over. Halo allows you to control the pump from your phone; you can press go as soon as you have positioned the irrigator.”
The Halo system helps to achieve compliant nitrogen levels, flow rates and volume, and it provides proof of placement and GPS monitoring or irrigators.
Halo can connect to weather systems, water pumps, silos and other farm systems.
Tag IT offers onfarm telemetry that support resource consent requirements.
“The monitoring systems we provide give stable and trouble free operation; products we supply are still in operation after many hours of cumulative field operation.
“All our systems will record and log information in a secure environment, provide secure access control and notify you if an alert condition is present and, more importantly, put you in control of this core function onfarm.”
