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FarmIQ Links To Lead With Pride

For Darfield dairy farmer Dan Schat, the decision to supply Synlait and participate in the company’s Lead with Pride initiative has proven to be a good one three years into farm ownership.

The Schats enjoy the double premium of supplying A2 milk and being on the Lead with Pride initiative, both making the company payments worth the extra effort the initiative involves.

Lead with Pride encompasses the four pillars of supply to Synlait, recognising and rewarding best practice in environment, animal health-welfare, social responsibility and milk quality.

Now emulated by other dairy companies, the initiative has set a high bar for dairying to address the key areas of social concern, and prove supplying farmers are rewarded for the extra steps they take in the process.

Those extra steps require a good level of record keeping and compliance and for this reason Synlait worked with FarmIQ to develop the company’s “Dairy Diary” system.

With a multitude of tasks demanding time and scheduling on the dairy farm, Dan finds the diary system an accessible, easy to use alert to ensure the dates for critical tasks don’t pass by unnoticed, piling up further down the season.

“For things like machinery maintenance it is ideal, and some of the admin tasks like getting our water consent renewed, something that may take some time but is critical, you can schedule it in well in advance.”

He has recently also been involved in a trial with a Lead with Pride “dashboard” which has lifted the alert system to another level.

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“It means it is now very easy to see when things are coming up, when they are overdue the dashboard changes to red to signal it may be overdue, for example like a monthly plant check. All the key Lead with Pride indicators are in there, and you can add in additional alerts.”

Dan tends to focus primarily on the diary for the farm operation, but has also made use of the SafeVisit health and safety component within FarmIQ to ensure he is meeting compliance needs for visitors and contractors coming onto the farm.

He can also see potential for utilising the chemical inventory management with some fine tuning, making stock taking and ordering a streamlined affair.

The Lead with Pride app integrates well with FarmIQ for auditing purposes, and he can set notes within the farm plan to direct an auditor to the farm fertiliser programme, for example, to check applications.

FarmIQ is proving it can work and integrate effectively with service providers in the dairy sector. It has also recently integrated into CRV’s new dairy farm management system MyHerd.

FarmIQ’s Enterprise Dairy system integrates with CRV Ambreed’s herd data, providing farmers with access to the full array of farm data including animal, feed, environment, staff, health and safety, timesheets, scheduling, rostering and automated NAIT recording.

“Rather than re-invent the wheel we have developed this in conjunction with FarmIQ. FarmIQ has been in this game for over seven years now. They have a very stable platform that was servicing sheep and beef farmers and now we have bought the dairy element to that so farmers who may have a dairy and sheep and beef can use the one platform for the whole enterprise,” said Andrew Singer, CRV’s IT manager.

For Dan, the experience with FarmIQ and Lead with Pride has proven to be a positive one, simplifying farm data entry and accessing it in an easy to understand fashion. He can see even more potential for the integration into Lead with Pride in the future too.

“Ultimately it would be good to have data like wash temperature and milk temperature for example to be auto logged into the system.

“We have found the FarmIQ team has been very good at taking feedback on board about what technology could be integrated into their programme.”

 

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