While the weather has caused Peter and Adele King headaches over the past month, the Co-op’s new data connections with other farm providers have made reporting a cinch.
When Farm Source caught up with the Canterbury farmers, tranches of their 197ha farm were suffering following storm flooding.
Peter and his wife Adele milk 660 cows at Burnham, on the outskirts of Christchurch, with their son, Sam, and three staff. They also run 100 beef cattle and have a 150ha runoff.
Peter and Adele have been with the Co-op for the best part of forty years. He says the Co-op’s data connections were a “good surprise” this past season.
“Like most farmers, we get overwhelmed with all of the regulatory stuff. We seemed to be duplicating data everywhere. I try to keep up with my Digital Dairy Diary to keep things accurate there. When it came to the most recent audit, we’d already pre-populated the information from Ballance (MyBallance) and LIC (MINDA) and we were told we wouldn’t be required to provide additional information. I reckon it took around an hour and a half off the audit time,” Peter says.
The only hurdle he faced was having to remove the runoff data that had inadvertently been put into MyBallance. He understands that this year, the data can be excluded before they start pre-populating the reports.
“All the rest, it was just a matter of clicking the button. One of my big bugbears is with all of the technology we deal with. Every site is different, and we are practical people. To me, you put on the screen what people should be clicking on. You shouldn’t have to click this, click that, click over there to open that. I find the Dairy Diary app is pretty easy to navigate and it works well,” he says.
