Helping farmers reach N targets
A DairyNZ programme to help farmers in two Canterbury catchments to reduce N loss has proved highly successful.
OverseerFM’s Farm Groups is proving popular with farmers across New Zealand, according to the company.
The tool is designed to provide a way of grouping individual farms together while measuring nutrient loss, enabling aggregated reporting and the benchmarking of nutrient losses against different aspects of the farm system such as relative stock units.
The tool can be used alongside industry partners to assess farms within a water catchment group, an irrigation scheme or supplying a processor.
Alastair Taylor, business development manager for Overseer, says over 100 farm groups have already been created and are using the tool.
“Farm Groups provides a convenient mechanism for farmers to collectively work together to understand and lower nutrient losses in an environment.
“It’s being well used by farm businesses managing multiple individual farms and by farms in a local area that wish to collaborate and help each other.”
Taylor says creating a group in the Farm Groups tool is simple.
“Anyone who subscribes to OverseerFM can do it. A group is set up based on its purpose and then farmers are invited to join that group. There is no time limit or limit to the number of farms allowed per group and additional farms can be invited to the group at any time.”
He says the tool enables groups to make decisions about nutrient management based on science instead of guesswork.
“By subscribing to OverseerFM, farmers or growers can identify how efficiently nutrients are being used on their farm, their level of losses into the environment and what is needed to maintain fertility to support their current production levels.
“OverseerFM’s sophisticated science model is not designed to provide an exact measurement of a single year’s losses, but a relative estimate of the annual nutrient losses on a farm over time, based on the farm’s management approach.
“The results should be used to understand the relative impact of a farm system and to monitor change over time as farm practice changes.”
Federated Farmers president Wayne Langford is claiming “some real success” on the 12 policy priorities it placed before the Coalition Government.
Federated Farmers is throwing its support behind the Fast-track Approvals Bill introduced by the Coalition Government to enable a fast-track decision-making process for infrastructure and development projects.
The latest report from ANZ isn’t good news for sheep farmers: lamb returns are forecast to remain low.
Divine table grapes that herald the start of a brand-new industry in Hawke’s Bay have been coming off vines in Maraekakaho.
In what appears to be a casualty of the downturn in the agricultural sector, a well-known machinery brand is now in the hands of liquidators and owing creditors $6.6 million.
One of New Zealand’s deepest breeder Jersey herds – known for its enduring connection through cattle with the UK’s longest reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II – will host its 75th anniversary celebration sale on-farm on April 22.