Synlait pasture monitoring and future directions

The New Zealand Kellogg Rural Leaders Programme develops emerging agribusiness leaders to help shape the future of New Zealand agribusiness and rural affairs. Lincoln University has been involved with this leaders programme since 1979 when it was launched with a grant from the Kellogg Foundation, USA.

Synlait has an established pasture monitoring system across all the Synlait dairy farms. The objective is to provide accurate, consistent and comparable measurements that can be used for management decisions, including pasture allocation, surplus identification and regrassing options. The Synlait pasture monitoring service has provided a vast amount of data on pasture growth rate and production, across a large range of soil types and irrigation systems. The management of this data and associated information has become fragmented due to the rapid expansion of the service, and the number of farms and paddocks involved. This report explains the development of the pasture monitoring service, and the systems used to get the information processed and presented to the farm managers. It also explores the scope and outline of a future database to capture and store existing and future Pasture Monitoring data. The second section of the report explores and details the future direction for this database, with an explanation of other external data that could be imported into an expanded pasture monitoring database. It looks at the possible relationships between pasture growth rate and soil temperature, soil moisture, air temperature and solar radiation. Incorporation of data obtained from two weather stations currently installed on Synlait farms, has been used to show the potential to develop into a robust pasture growth rate predictor, aiding the accuracy of management decisions for the farms.