New Agri-app puts farm data at fingertips
A new partnership is set to give Manawatu farmers access to more data about their properties through their mobile phones.
Ballance Agri-nutrients and Hill Laboratories have joined together to create a new app, which will be rolled out nationwide over the next month. Ballance sales manager Campbell Parker said the deal gave Hill sole rights to the Ballance co-op’s soil and herbage test results from August, and provided Ballance customers access to the new mobile app that would give them the information they needed to make effective nutrient management plans.
Federated Farmers Manawatu president James Stewart said innovative farmers were looking for smarter ways to use their resources. ’’It’s all about spending money wisely, and using nutrients efficiently, so more accuracy in the data can lead to good savings.’’
Hill commercial manager Bart Chillis said the app allows tests to be requested, and co-ordinated, through Ballance’s 37 service centres, five of which are in Manawatu including Marton, Feilding and Shannon.
The app uses GPS co-ordinates to tag soil testing results to the exact place the sample was taken from. ‘‘Our field team can enter soil sample information for each site on a farmer’s property into the app, where they can easily access and compare them over time,’’ Parker said.
All of the information is linked to a barcode on the sample container, which can be scanned with a phone, reducing the amount of information that has to be entered by hand, and data-entry mistakes.
‘‘It takes a lot of the manual work out of the process, which means results should come back faster for farmers.’’
Stewart said as data and sampling services became more available and easier to use, farmers would quickly adopt them.