John Deere launches Harvest Profit in NZ & Australia
Recently released in Australia and New Zealand by John Deere, a unique new software platform offers near real time profitability monitoring across crops and individual paddocks.
Machinery manufacturer John Deere and livestock specialists DeLaval have pooled their resources to create the Milk Sustainability Center (MSC), described as a digital ecosystem to help dairy farmers improve the efficiency and sustainability of their operations.
The ecosystem will be open for further partners to join, with the objective of providing farmers with the data needed for a holistic view of their dairy operations.
Dairy farmers will be able to use the Milk Sustainability Center to monitor nutrient use efficiency (NUE) for nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), across the entire farm, specific fields, or the milking herd.
The MSC will also provide data to compare performance against other dairy operations and drill down to identify key areas for improvement. The system aims to serve dairy farmers with operation specific information, independent of farm machinery brands or herd management software.
“Dairy farming is perhaps one of the most complex agricultural business’s today with no system integration between crop and animal performance. Typically, dairy farmers might use five or more different, nonconnected software solutions to run their business,” said Dave Chipak, director, dairy & livestock production systems at John Deere.
Following farmer authorisation, data from DeLaval Plus and the John Deere Operations Center will be automatically pulled into the Milk Sustainability Center. The aim is to reduce manual data input, ensuring higher data quality, and ultimately helping to create an entire overview of a farm system, including fields, cows, employees, advisors, machinery and other assets; all working in collaboration.
Applications have now opened for the 2026 Meat Industry Association scholarships.
Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) says it is backing aspiring dairy farmers through a new initiative designed to make the first step to farm ownership or sharemilking easier.
OPINION: While farmers are busy and diligently doing their best to deal with unwanted gasses, the opponents of farming - namely the Greens and their mates - are busy polluting the atmosphere with tirades of hot air about what farmers supposedly aren't doing.
OPINION: For close to eight years now, I have found myself talking about methane quite a lot.
The Royal A&P Show of New Zealand, hosted by the Canterbury A&P Association, is back next month, bigger and better after the uncertainty of last year.
Claims that farmers are polluters of waterways and aquifers and 'don't care' still ring out from environmental groups and individuals. The phrase 'dirty dairying' continues to surface from time to time. But as reporter Peter Burke points out, quite the opposite is the case. He says, quietly and behind the scenes, farmers are embracing new ideas and technologies to make their farms sustainable, resilient, environmentally friendly and profitable.
OPINION: Voting is underway for Fonterra’s divestment proposal, with shareholders deciding whether or not sell its consumer brands business.
OPINION: Politicians and Wellington bureaucrats should take a leaf out of the book of Canterbury District Police Commander Superintendent Tony Hill.