Tech to the fore at field days
Technology was a strong feature at this year’s Central District Fieldays, as farmers increasingly look to make life easier and more efficient on farm.
Many gadgets and apps on offer were aimed at giving farmers greater freedom to manage things at a distance. Others, such as FarmIQ, freed up time so farmers weren’t doing paper work in the evening.
Agritech company Levno’s levnodome product and app could monitor how much milk was in the vat at any one time by using a lidar signal.
The device could determine the quantity and temperature of the milk, check if the agitators were working, and send the information back to the farmer, said marketing manager Kate Gwilliam.
Lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging, is a remote sensing method that uses pulsed light to measure distances. It’s the technology used in selfdriving cars, among other things.
‘‘My husband and I are farmers, and we can sit on the couch at the end of the day, look at the app and see exactly how much milk we’ve got
in the milk vat,’’ Gwilliam said.
The device could also be used to help with compliance.
Farmers were looking for new ways to do things and had increasingly embraced technology in recent years, she said.
Other gadgets, such as the Agdrone, simply took the pain out of regular farm tasks.
Agdrone chief pilot Warrick Funnell said there was a general
acceptance of drones in agriculture.
‘‘On opening day, we probably had double the leads than we would have had two years ago at this event,’’ he said.
The Agdrone used less water but was just as effective at killing weeds as other methods. The company had added a second pump to the drone so it could cover twice the area, he said.
Gary Flutey, agri-tech manager at C-Dax, said farmers wanted more accuracy as councils demanded more detail about which products were used and where.
Its spraying and spreading systems helped farmers through automation and fully traceable applications by using its XC3 smart control console, with GPS.
Farm maps could be uploaded to the console, which could be attached to any of the C-Dax products, giving farmers more accurate data on the job.
C-Dax customer service manager Richard Brown said the console could tell the farmer how much was sprayed and where, providing traceability.
The console collected data many times a second, allocating it to particular paddocks. It could tell a farmer to ‘‘go left a bit’’, or which areas already had too much or too little fertiliser, he said.
Flutey said C-Dax had also developed a pasture meter, which told farmers how much feed was available in the pasture by measuring grass height. The farm manager could better allocate a feed budget using the meter.
Several models required a driver on a buggy with the meter in tow to capture the information, but another product did the same thing autonomously. It was controlled through a mobile app and the data was later uploaded.
‘‘C-Dax, with Massey’s involvement, has developed a robot. The robot goes out on the grass on a pre-programmed path, measuring the kilograms per hectare [of dry matter] as it goes.
‘‘When it finally comes back it docks itself and uploads the information to [the hawkeye app],’’ Flutey said.