Data connections between the Co-op and other farm providers are making life easier for farmers when preparing for Farm Dairy Assessments and completing tasks like Farm Dairy Records.
Managing on-farm activities, family commitments, and farm administration can be a juggle. Bay of Plenty farmers Melissa and Jack Shove found this season’s assessments and recording tasks “a breeze” compared to previous years. Melissa and Jack run two farms – contract milking 400 cows on 116ha of effective land on the Rangitāiki Plains (owned by Michael and Kaye Watkin) and share milking 250 cows on a smaller 87ha farm about 2km away closer to the hills.
Melissa uses the Co-op’s Dairy Diary app, LIC’s MINDA, and Ballance’s MyBallance apps and says she no longer has to double-handle information across her farm partners.
“We can go online to upload annual feed and fertiliser proof of purchases, but what’s really handy is taking a photo on-farm and uploading these directly through the Dairy Diary app. We have all our staff on the Dairy Diary app so they can enter details of cows that they’ve treated, and Jack can use it for proof of application when we are doing any spraying. It’s making our life a little bit simpler. When you’ve got three kids, it’s busy. Sometimes, the last thing you want to be doing is sitting there at night time entering information. So yeah, it’s saved us a lot of angst and time,” Melissa says.
She’s since learned more ways to streamline activities.
“Last season, if I had known that I could upload documents straight away for proof, like feed purchases and stuff like that, I would have done it then and there. So this year, that’s what I’ll be doing. Michael and Kaye email me their annual summary records and I upload them. I’m now teaching Kaye how to upload them directly, or with fertiliser it now comes directly from MyBallance. It cuts out a lot of the double handling,” Melissa says.
Melissa and Jack have found the technology “talks to each other” well, with information relayed fairly seamlessly. For the rare entries that do need tweaking, these have been simple to achieve.
“Michael does the carryovers. The numbers come through from MINDA, and I have to edit these for our Farm Dairy Records. But it’s now a pre-populated figure, so I don’t have to jump between MINDA back into my Farm Dairy Records to work out the numbers. I’m able to just look at the numbers and take off whatever has been carried over. I know that that’s pretty accurate. It’s no longer a time-consuming exercise.”
Melissa says she was able to use the online checklist ahead of the annual shed assessment and pre-load all the information for the QCONZ assessor to check off before they came out on-farm.
“I was away on a school camp during the assessment, but having used the online checklist before I went, I was confident the assessor had all the information she needed ahead of time,” she says.
“Jack said it was the fastest shed assessment we’d had since all the requirements had changed. The inspector was able to check a lot of our paperwork before she even came on-farm as I had used the new online checklist and had uploaded all of our evidence correctly ahead of time. The overall assessment only took 45 minutes to complete.”