Fonterra, Sharesies join to make share trading easier
Fonterra is teaming up with wealth app provider Sharesies to make it easier for its farmer shareholders to trade co-op shares among themselves.
Fonterra is working with innovation partners whose technology offerings can help farmers manage their businesses better.
The co-op’s Activate 2.0 programme is designed to support this initiative. Run by Fonterra Farm Source, Activate 2.0 is a competition open to third party innovators designed to help Fonterra’s farmers lower input costs, save time and/or increase productivity.
Earlier this month, seven innovators were invited to Fonterra’s head office in Auckland to pitch to judges.
Three finalists were chosen: Regen Ltd, Agrismart and Wikldeye; the winning entrant will be announced later this week.
Regen’s offering is an automated, science based, daily scheduling of recommendations for water and effluent, and a nitrogen use calculator, available direct to the farmer via a mobile app.
The aim is to make it easy for farmers to accurately manage water, effluent and nitrogen use so as to minimise water waste and nutrient leaching and save power and fertiliser costs.
Regen says its system also captures the on-field data and activity in report form for farm environment plans and audits, without the farmer having to manually do it all themselves.
Agrismart has developed people management software designed especially for the dairy industry to reduce breaches in paying the minimum hourly rate to salaried workers.
The timesheet software records the number of hours worked in a pay period and then calculates and alerts the farmer if any top-up is required in that pay period, ensuring they pay the employees the correct amount.
Wildeye is offering a soil moisture monitoring device that optimises use of irrigation to support water-use obligations and ultimately reduce costs and raise efficiency.
The device measures soil moisture and displays it in the cloud with an intuitive interface. It allows farmers to make better use of their available water and know when the soils are too saturated for effluent management.
Wildeye says it is a simple, robust and affordable product for metering remote sensors that works ‘out of the box’.
Fonterra Farm Source chief operating officer Miles Hurrell says he is impressed with the new technology on offer.
“Farmers and those associated with farming businesses are demanding more,” he told Dairy News.
So Fonterra recently launched Agrigate to make the lives of farmers easier.
“We are keen to pool data from different sources and make our shareholders’ lives easy.”
He says Agrigate will work with the Activate 2.0 participants to help take the technology to the co-op’s farmer shareholders.
Trade Minister Todd McClay says New Zealand has no intention of backing down in a trade dispute with Canada over dairy products.
There have been leadership changes at the Hamilton-based Dairy Goat Co-operative, which has been struggling financially in recent years.
Horticulture NZ chief executive Nadine Tunley will step down in August.
OPINION: In recent years farmers have been crying foul of unworkable and expensive regulations.
Another 16 commercial beef farmers have been selected to take part in the Informing New Zealand Beef (INZB) programme designed to help drive the uptake of genetics in the industry.
Trade Minister Todd McClay says Kiwi exporters will be $100 million better off today as the NZ-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) comes into force.
OPINION: Canterbury milk processor Synlait is showing no sign of bouncing back from its financial doldrums.
OPINION: It seems every bugger in this country can get an award these days.