Merino NZ games audit process

Actual specialises in environmental, social and governance (ESG) data analysis using a SimCity like interface to help make sense of complex relationships.

NZM will marry the technology to its ZQRX platform, which allows farmers to audit and improve farm performance across a range of environmental, social responsibility and animal welfare metrics.

NZM chief executive John Brakenridge told Rural News that it will help ZQRX farmers simplify the "huge amount of compliance that is coming their way" in a manner that is easy to understand and helps them with the solutions.

"It's a very easy to use way to be able to say, 'if I did this and if I did that, what would that do to a carbon score and, say, a biodiversity score?'"

Brakenridge says the interface did not trivialise the issues but presented key ingredients in a way that made it "just so much easier to use".

Actual was launched by a group of engineers, two of them PhDs, with solid track records in fields as varied as aeronautics and human cognition.

"I think what sold us on it was the horsepower and capabilities of the people behind it," Brakenridge explains.

Brakenridge recetly accompanied Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on her official visit to the United States, which included Ardern and California Governor Gavin Newsom signing a Memorandum of Cooperation to work together on climate change.

Brakenridge formally signed the Actual partnership with company co-founders Dr Karthik Balakrishnan and Dr Derek Lyons, as part of that San Francisco ceremony.

"The signing of this agreement between ZQRX and Actual is exactly the type of innovation we hope to see from the Memorandum of Cooperation, with two organisations from each respective nation paving the way as change makers and innovators within the sustainability space," Ardern said.

Brakenridge said farmers gather data in many ways, such as through Farm IQ and Overseer, and the Actual platform will generate APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to interface with other systems and avoid double-ups.

"As far as I know, we're the first API that is plugged into Farm IQ, for example."

NZM has been road showing a prototype of the new system to its farmers and hopes to roll out a working version in three to six months.

"We'd like to think that we will be one of the first groups of New Zealand farmers that are going to have an easy interpretation of not only their gross carbon numbers, but also their net."

Meanwhile, NZM says that wool grown on ZQRX farms now represents about 15% of the New Zealand wool clip but 43% of its value.

Brakenridge said NZM's philosophy was always to take what happens on farm and ensure it is packaged for the market, with long-term profitable contracts with its brand partners to provide stability of returns.

ZQRX brand partners include Smartwool, Allbirds, Icebreaker and Reda.