Five things in choosing a monitoring system

There are two reasons: to improve farm performance by reducing costs, and for safer environmental compliance, the company says.

When installed on farms that use a pond or saucer for effluent storage, monitoring and control systems typically have three sets of components:

First, hardware that controls the pump and the stirrer, at the pond or in the shed

Second, hardware that operates at the effluent distribution end, whether K-lines or pods, a travelling irrigator, or a pivot, whether underslung or injected

Third, software that enables the controlling and monitoring, providing local and remote starting and stopping, alerts, auto shut-down, GPS and flow data reporting, and more.

When considering what effluent monitoring and control system is best for the farm in question, the following are primary:

Trustworthiness

If you are looking to have a fail-safe system, make sure it can be trusted. Some monitors work by sending a message such as a text, only when something goes wrong with your irrigator, for example if the wire rope jams and the irrigator stops moving but it keeps spreading.

However if the messaging system itself fails, then the alert does not get through and an effluent 'doughnut' can result, and potentially a hefty fine for a resource breach.

Best to buy a system that constantly sends metrics such as pressure at the irrigator and movement that keeps the pump going; but such a system will interpret any cessation of the 'keep pumping' data -- whether because of a fault with the irrigator or with the messaging itself -- as a reason to shut off the pump. Good.

Compliance

After spending hefty sums on effluent infrastructure, it makes sense to complete the entire system with a monitor/controller, but only if it ensures environmental compliance. To ensure compliance-quality data, GPS-based records of applied nutrients will increasingly need to be complete and accurate, and electronically generated and recorded. Entering records manually is subject to hit-and-miss, human error, and perhaps even intentional fudging by staff who were too busy to relocate the irrigator when the farm owner was away.

Financial viability

The set-up and operation costs of a good system when properly designed and integrated not only show a return on capital investment but also save money. Fresh, nutrient-rich effluent is a valuable resource, so setting up an optimal system should generate a return on investment, and cut indirect costs such as staff time and wear and tear on quads.

Modularity

Dairy farms increasingly rely on accurate data to support management decisionmaking. An effluent monitoring and control system needs to send data across the farm, using the same network or UHF equipment as other devices onfarm. Buying a proprietary system that is 'sealed', i.e. that will operate only with itself and will not link with other onfarm activities, is obsolete even now, never mind in the future as modularity becomes the norm.

Integration

Dairy farms are complex businesses with substantial interdependence between herd and pasture, people and production. Until recently, companies selling sophisticated technology have tended to polarise into two camps – herd and pasture. A step change is now afoot, notably in LIC's long-term partnership with Precision Farming. LIC's expertise is chiefly in livestock, whereas Precision Farming's is in pasture. This partnership will now allow dairy farmers to accumulate their herd and pasture data in one place, optimising their farm performance, especially in the interdependence of herd and pasture.

When considering an effluent monitoring and control system, think of it as one building block in the whole structure of farm management information, rather than a single activity on its own. This approach, bringing together herd data including feed demand with pasture production including feed wedge, fertiliser, effluent, soil moisture and temperature and other data takes the farmer takes the farmer a long way towards cutting costs in a pasture based system.