These are just two questions that farmers can now answer, using this year's recently released Farm Insights Report.
Now in its third year, the Farm Insights Report is a personalised view of what's happening on your farm. It uses information provided by farmers in their Farm Dairy Records, alongside milk quality and production data, and industry data, to provide potential areas for fine-tuning farm efficiency.
"It's a tool to help each farmer understand how their own farm is performing," says Talia Grala, one of Farm Source's On Farm Excellence Programme Leads.
Talia's team are responsible for delivering the environmental sections of the report.
"What's unique about the report is that it doesn't just tell you what you already know. It turns data that farmers have provided into helpful insights that can support them in making key decisions."
As conversations around farm efficiency are top of mind, Talia highlights that the right insight can help farmers identify areas to increase productivity and save costs.
"Through the Farm Insights Report, we can help farmers see if they're operating in the most efficient way. For example, a farmer may have a higher nitrogen use, but lower amounts of grass grown, compared with their neighbours. That tells us that there's a potential opportunity to either reduce the amount of fertiliser used, or to increase pasture production. And ultimately that's a way to either save money or make more money for the farm, as well as reducing waste."
But Talia is quick to caution that data quality is key to the accuracy of the report.
"The more accurate the data is, the better the benchmarking and the better the insights are for identifying key efficiency opportunities."
Using the Dairy Diary can help with tracking activities on-farm throughout the year and this information can be used to pre-populate the records.
Industry integration is also helping, with MyBallance users now able to approve sharing of fertiliser purchase information with the Farm Dairy Records.
For Farmer Support Advisor, Vicki Wallace, the most valuable part of getting Farm Insights Reports is seeing farmers compare findings and learn from each other.
"Last year, we got a few neighbouring farmers together, and they chatted about their results. Some farmers had quite different results, but farm under similar conditions. They were able to talk about what they do differently, and then go away and make some changes to see if they could get a better result. It's all about taking the information on board, and then figuring out what might work best on your farm. Some things may work well for one farm, but not for another. It's easy to get stuck in the day-to-day, but sometimes it's good to see things from another angle."
What's in the report this year?
For the first time this year, the Farm Insights Report includes an overview page on farm efficiency and a page on milk production per cow. It provides a summary of farm performance in three key areas: milk, animals, and environment.
Farmers can expect to see metrics for:
- Purchased Nitrogen Surplus
- Nitrogen Risk Scorecard
- Nitrogen Fertiliser Optimisation
- Greenhouse Gas Emissions per kgMS
- Milk Production and Efficiency
- Somatic Cell Count
- Animal Welfare, including heat stress, lameness, and mastitis.
Farmers are encouraged to speak to their local field teams or rural professionals about their Farm Insights Reports. Fonterra has a range of support, tools, services, and solutions to help farmers get the most from their report findings.
Accessing your Farm Insights Report
Visit the Farm Source website and navigate to 'My Farm' and then 'Farm Insights'.