A better way to breed
Farmlands Head of Enabling Technology, John Arrell, spent a day at Farmlands Chairman Rob Hewett’s farm finding out about smart collars for sheep and how the data they provide is used to optimise breeding outcomes. An early morning start in Central Otago led me to a woolshed on our Chairman, Rob Hewett’s farm. I’ve been involved with precision farming for over 20 years, starting off with satellite based control of machinery and evolving to work with data-driven information on our soils as the technology evolved – knowing what to put on and where to get maximum return on investment. This was my first time working with smart technology on sheep and working with sheep themselves was a new endeavour for me. What I learned was that precision
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farming on land and soils had exactly the same principals as precision farming on livestock. The key to both is the ability to measure. Here’s what I mean — I used to give talks to National Farmers Union groups back in the UK on precision farming. I always opened up a presentation with the question: “Who knows what precision farming is?” I used to get loads of answers from the audience and the majority mentioned satellites. I then turned the conversation around and always put up the image of a man ploughing behind a horse with a one furrow plough. I then challenged the answers with the statement that horse ploughing was the ultimate in precision farming and our goal is to get back to that. Let me explain my answer. When a farmer ploughed with a horse he
walked every inch of the soil and was deeply connected to it. When the soil type changed, he put in a fence, hedge or boundary and farmed that smaller paddock to its yield and crop potential. His farmyard manure was his finite fertiliser source and he only put it onto paddocks that he knew needed it and would get a return in-terms of a better crop or to enhance poorer land. He suppressed weeds by using rotations and knew what crops should be planted for that soil type. As agriculture across the world evolved to meet population demands – to an extent driven by World War II – it got increasingly mechanised with tractors replacing the horse and a disconnect from walking the land. As tractors got larger the smaller paddocks of similar soil type became inefficient to work and we began to
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