Text arrives on time so farmers can avoid a fine

Developed by agricultural scientist and entrepreneur Bridgit Hawkins, chief executive of ReGen, the app enables farmers to know the exact status of their farm before they turn on their effluent irrigator. It equips them to manage effluent, nitrogen and water using data collected from their farm and analysed by a software package. The information comes to them daily.

Farmers using the system buy, in effect, a weather station that measures rainfall, soil moisture, temperature, wind speed and direction. These devices are connected to a telemetry device that automatically sends this data into the cloud every 15 minutes via the cellphone network and from there ReGen analyses that information and sends the results back to the farmer.

“What we do is ask ‘what is the capacity of your soil? what are your consent conditions?’ Then we say ‘for you today it is appropriate to irrigate effluent’. 

“Having done the calculations with our software we can send a text to the farmer saying, for example, ‘today you can irrigate 4ms’. And if he follows that recommendation he can be sure he will not risk breaching conditions on leaching run-off and is following best practice.”

Hawkins says of the 150 customers they have so far, most are  early adopters and innovators – people who understand the value of information. 

Many are Southland farmers, whose drivers are the clear compliance requirements of the regional council. The ReGen system enables those farmers to meet those requirements. 

“It’s hard for farmers to meet some of these requirements. Our system takes out the fear factor – the worry about inadvertently making a mistake and getting fined for it. They are unsure about all the things that need to be managed.

“When you have staff or multiple farms you can’t be everywhere all the time, so it’s ideal to have a system working in the background and providing sound advice every single day and then being able to monitor what happens.”

Hawkins says historically a lot of farmers have relied on their intuition and observation to make decisions, but that is not the only way. Having a tool working overnight in the background analysing data as ReGen does is another option. 

“While we are a software business, our focus is that it must work for the farmer. So all our developments -- not just the effluent and nitrogen products, but also our irrigation programme – have started with the farmer. We’ve asked them what their challenges are and about  the environment they work in and how they take in information, when and how. 

“Then we’ve worked back from there. Rather than starting with the technology and saying ‘we can do all these great things’, we have asked ‘what do you need as a farmer to manage better?”

The system is self-monitoring and can check sensors and detect and deal with problems before the farmer even knows about them.  

Subscribers to the ReGen service are farmers who realise the value of good data driving productivity and profitability; they don’t necessarily have to be very tech savvy, Hawkins says.

“We have some users who are not overly competent on their computer but what we deliver is simple – through a phone; it’s not a high tech product. There is a tremendous amount of technology underneath it, but how the user interfaces with it is simple: all you have to do is turn on your phone and you have access to the information.”

The cost varies to buy into the service: the initial cost of the weather station is $4000-$7000, a subscription to the effluent and fertiliser systems is around $1900 and the irrigation system is charged on a per hectare basis. As well as the daily text, subscribers receive a monthly report so they can analyse their data.   

Expensive?  “If a farmer was to get a fine for wrongly spraying effluent on their property that could easily be $5000 or $10,000,” Hawkins says.

“Then there’s the savings for using effluent efficiently and the same for irrigation. In the case of the latter, by putting the right amount of water on a farmer can grow more grass and reduce N leaching.”

Also good as a fert app

The ReGen app also allows the user to maximise the use of fertiliser. 

Hawkins gives a typical example of a farmer planning to spread urea, for which the app has a standard price.

The farmer can select an application rate of, say, 75kg/ha. “He then presses the ‘calculate’ button and, based on his soil condition and the proposed fertiliser application rate, the app comes up with the likely response rate he’s going to get.”

The app can then work out the value of putting on fertiliser to grow grass as opposed to the cost of buying in supplementary feed. 

“We are trying to enable farmers to know when nitrogen is a good cheap source of feed and how to use it sustainably. It’s not fertiliser advice, it’s giving them the tool to make an informed decision and maybe look at some alternatives.”

While the app is popular with dairy farmers, it is also a valuable tool for horticulturalists, especially for, say, frost monitoring. And it has wider uses in precision agriculture.

“In the broader sense it asks ‘how can we make the right inputs at the right time?’ Some of the solutions we are starting to scope up are building a growth model for particular crops. 

When you know what is driving the stage of growth of a crop such as maize, because you are measuring air temperature and soil temperature and rainfall you can make some timely decisions. 

“When a crop like maize gets to a certain stage that’s the time you want to be applying fertiliser as opposed to having it set on a calendar basis because every year is different. 

“We are enabling efficient use of a resource to get a better outcome for the farmer and a better environment,” she says.

From reporoa to the cloud

Hawkins grew up on a sheep and beef farm at Reporoa and later graduated in ag science from Massey University. 

Much of her career was in science commercialisation, working for AgResearch, SpectraNet and the Danish Technology Institute.

She was able to found ReGen when sensing technology, telemetry, the internet, broadband and cellphone networks improved. These technologies enabled this app to become a reality.

“This technology was enabling decision support to be done in a different way for farmers. 

ReGen grew out of saying ‘we could do this and that, and farmers could make better decisions if 

they had access to real time information.”