Podcast Summary:
In this podcast, Ollie talks about how Pasture.io began as a solution to help make better grazing decisions for his family dairy farm. He started walking the farm once a week with a rising plate meter to collect information on pasture growth rates, biomass, and grazing activities. The information was initially collected in a spreadsheet, later a FileMaker database, and then a web platform in 2014. In 2018, remote pasture measurements using satellites were added, and in 2021, Pasture.io started working with Farm Pulse to provide auto-grazing using GPS trackers. Ollie explains that the auto-grazer helps close the loop with remote pasture measurements, making grazing events integral to getting accurate satellite-backed pasture measurements. Ollie also discusses the importance of timely and accurate data entry for optimizing pasture utilization and how the app is being redesigned to make data entry easier for farmers. Ollie's future goal for Pasture.io is to continue to work with farmers to help relieve their mental burden of daily decision-making on grazing and provide them with the tools to make informed grazing decisions.
Podcast Transcript:
Andrew Savage: If you're looking for a place to hang out and figure out where you can take the next step in your dairy farming business, then you're in the right spot.
Welcome to the High Performance Herd podcast. Here, we will inform you about what you can do today to future-proof your business for tomorrow. Big thanks to our sponsors: Fonterra, IDEX, Kuru Diagnostics, Taz Herd, Tasmanian Dairy Trust, Zoetis, NHIA, and DataMars. I'm your host, Andrew Savage. Enjoy this episode of the High Performance Herd podcast wherever you may be listening. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode and jump on our Facebook group, the High Performance Herd project.
Today, we're catching up with Ollie Roberts from Pasture IO. Ollie is from a family dairy farm here in Tasmania. He has spent time managing his dairy farm near Boat Harbour in the northwest of Tassie. At one stage, he invested in a herd of milking cows and had young stock before selling them to follow off-farm pursuits such as Pasture IO. Ollie has gone on to found Pasture IO, a system that is saving farmers thousands of hours and labor by managing pasture from space. Hi Ollie, and welcome to the High Performance Herd project. Tell us something about yourself that perhaps people don't know about you.
Ollie Roberts: G'day Andrew, well, that's quite a question. So, something about myself. I'm an avid bird photographer who loves spending time in the bush. It gets me close to nature, frees the head, and everything. I love being out in the elements, taking photos of birds, and observing what's happening. It's a bit like cows; my love for cows and their gentle nature is similar to my love for birds. So, that's something that people might not know about me.
Andrew Savage: That's really cool. I guess being an entrepreneur, you've had a pretty full-on journey into the digital world and that type of thing, so having a way of releasing your mind and mindfulness is probably very important, I imagine.
Speaking of Pasture IO, can you tell us a bit about Pasture IO, especially those early days of the conception of your company? How did Pasture IO come about and what problem were you trying to solve?
Ollie Roberts: Yeah, well, Pasture.io started back in 2005. It all started with a conversation around the milk vat after the evening milking had finished. My uncle and my dad were standing there talking as they have for decades, and here I am, a young Ollie, thinking he knows best, telling them how it was done and asking lots of questions. Very curious to understand why they're making the decisions that they're making, why they're not making the decisions as effectively as I thought they could be. That was around where the animals should graze next and things like that. Through this conversation with my uncle and dad, I got the feedback that was, "Right, you little shit, if you think you can do it better, then you decide where the herd will graze next." Little did I know at the time, that was just putting a big weight on my shoulders. A lot of responsibility was handed to me right then, and that was to basically decide the profitable outcomes of our family dairy farm. So, I started asking even more questions, questions outside of just my father and my uncle. Questions such as, "How do you know how much pasture is in a paddock? How do you know how much pasture an animal can eat? Do animals waste pasture? What's the go with the cow clumps or the pasture clumps you see in the paddock? How do you put those into formulas and calculations? How quickly should the cows rotationally graze around the farm?" These questions started leading me towards walking the farm once a week with a rising plate meter. Previously, on our farm, we'd maybe measured the farm once a quarter, if we were lucky, maybe once a season, to get a good understanding of where the average farm pasture cover was sitting. I could see an opportunity to tighten this up, and that's where the weekly pasture walks came in around 17 years ago. Before long, we were collecting a lot of data or a lot of information. That information included things like how much pasture was in a paddock, what the growth rate of the pasture was in each paddock across the farm. The other bits of information were around grazing. How long had it been since paddocks were last grazed? All of this information we were collecting in, to begin with, was a spreadsheet and then became a file maker database before it turned back into a spreadsheet. We were able to really start to get and make better grazing decisions. Decisions that ultimately drive the profitability and sustainability of our farm operation. So, what I'm saying is the problem that Pasture.io first evolved to overcome was how can we make the best use of manual pasture measurements to make informed grazing decisions. So, I guess that's where the program has come from, and now we have things like timely grazing of pastures, taking into account how much biomass or how many kilograms of dry matter is in each paddock, as well as what is the leaf stage of each paddock. So, understanding days since grazed and rotation length and balancing all of that.
Andrew Savage: That's an incredible story. You know, something as simple as a conversation can spark such a big journey for you. And I guess when you talk about transitioning to now, when you fast forward to Pasture.io today and that conversation from the milk vat, where is Pasture.io at now, and what do you offer, and how do farmers use your product currently?
Ollie Roberts: Yeah, very good question. Where is Pasture.io now, and how do farmers use the product? Well, Pasture.io in 2014 turned into a web platform, and that web platform meant that we were finally able to transfer data without breaking the data and the formulas. This spreadsheet that had grown over nearly 10 years had grown into a monster that included fertilizer applications, grazing records, how many kilos of grain or silage or pasture were being fed to each cow, all of this data. Each time we transferred that, it would break. So, the web platform was developed in 2014 to overcome that. Then in 2016, we publicly launched Pasture.io. Now, if people do remember 2016, it's scarred into everyone's minds who dairy farm for the clawback year. It was a terrible time to release. So, I went on to follow other pursuits. Then in 2018, the daily flyover constellation of the Planet Labs satellite constellation enabled the remote pasture measurements. Now, why the daily flyover is important is because dairy farming happens generally in high rainfall areas where there's lots of cloud cover. So, the daily flyover frequency increases the chance of getting a clear morning or a clear image to provide a satellite-backed pasture measurement. The program has evolved from utilizing manual pasture measurements to make informed grazing decisions to now automating those pasture measurements using satellites. And Intel version 2, which is still under development, but very much what we're training everyone in now. Now, version 2 works well on your phone. It's fast, and we're able to manipulate information so you can view things such as your paddock performance and where to graze cows easier. At the end of last year, we started to work with Farm Pulse in Tasmania with their GPS trackers as a partner to help provide the auto grazer. So, the auto grazer, when those animals enter into a paddock, it then records the grazing. So, all of that information is being collected automatically. So, a farmer can pick up their phone, see, "Oh yeah, that paddock was, you know, 20 days since it was last grazed. Currently, the leaf emergence is at eight days, so it's around two and a half leaf stage." So, they can make these decisions without actually having to pull out a notepad or record any of these data points onto a whiteboard or into another spreadsheet or anything like that. Am I answering your question of where the program is now?
Andrew Savage: Definitely. Yeah, yeah. And I guess Farm Pulse is another fantastic Tassie AgTech story, isn't it? And I think maybe we might have to get them into the High Performance Herd studio at some stage because they're up to some pretty cool things as well. You did mention in a previous conversation the importance of the timing of recording that grazing. So, do you see this auto grazer as maybe really another great step in optimizing pasture utilization?
Ollie Roberts: Yes, certainly. I see the auto grazer as helping close the loop with remote pasture measurements. So, like everything, we work with a whole group of farmers. Some just want a feed wedge; they don't want anything else. Others are mainly concerned around days since grazing or leaf stage, not so much concerned around biomass. Then you've got farmers that just want to use everything. They want to record all their fertilizer applications, all their grazings, everything. So, we work with a whole range of farmers that have different needs. The key with the auto grazer is that it enables all of those farmers to utilize a closed-loop system.
Now, by a closed-loop system, what I mean is that the grazing activities or the grazing events being recorded and maintained is integral to getting accurate remote pasture measurements or satellite-backed pasture measurements. Without the grazing events, the satellite-backed pasture measurements are sub-optimal. It can be an annoying thing for a farmer to do, to maintain a grazing record. We've made it as simple as you can. So, you use the Version 2 app, you show it on your phone, and you just open up Nutri and simply go click, "Yes, I grazed that paddock there," save. It's very easy. Our encouragement is for people to make it habitual. But the thing with the auto grazer is it just removes that completely. So, if a farmer doesn't want to make it a habitual thing to keep their grazings recorded or up to date, they can just simply pick up the phone and see the feed wedge, and that feed wedge will be very accurate based on the satellites flying overhead and the automatic grazing entries that are being recorded. So, that's the key part of the auto grazer and the GPS trackers.
Andrew Savage: It's fantastic. And I guess one big problem farmers are facing is that multiple data entry points. I know myself, even for the focus farm, I've actually been entering the carvings for the collars and matings are the same. It's nothing to get five days behind, and all of a sudden, instead of having 20 records to enter, you've all of a sudden got 200, and it's turned from something to do over a coffee to something that's going to take all day. So, I think the more we can automate that type of task, the better off we're going to be. I'd like to talk about the satellites themselves. I mean, it seems quite futuristic, but it's a pretty out-there statement to go from a pasture plate meter into looking to space. I mean, how did that actually happen? The thought of using satellites and how do the satellites actually measure pasture from way out there?
Ollie Roberts: Very good question. I think when it comes to the marketing messages, it's easier to sell it as satellite pasture measurements, but that's not entirely the whole picture. The satellites by themselves are very good at measuring pasture within a narrow window, and that narrow window can be optimized based on the grazing system. Generally, with a dairy farm system like the one behind me, where it's high rainfall, lush pastures, those sorts of things, the narrow window is pitched between about 2000 kilos and 2500 kilos of dry matter per hectare. Now, anything over 2500, the satellites can't really see or help too much because the way the satellites work is that they fly over, they scan the earth, they take an image, and they extract different wavelengths of color. There's only so much color that the satellites can extract or the optics can extract from what it sees at 2500 and above before the plant hits saturation.
So, just imagine the leaves are starting to fold over at 2500, and by 3000, we all know like leaves are covered, and you've got canopy closure. The satellites or the models cannot actually see any color on the ground. So, in that case, we need to start to bring in other elements. Those other elements are driven by things like the growth rate of the pasture. That's when we bring in the weather data. So, we've got satellite images, we've got the local weather data. Things like precipitation, evapotranspiration, temperature, and those sorts of things. Then there's a third element that we bring in. The first is satellite images, the second is local weather data, and the third is the paddock activities. The grazings, which we've discussed quite a lot now, are quite important for the remote pasture measurements. The grazings are a key part, and all of that information is fed into the models. The models then are able to produce, based on the information that is known, how much pasture is in each paddock or how quickly the pasture is growing.
So, in a nutshell, how do satellites measure pasture? Well, satellites are a key component of the remote sensing, but it's not the satellites alone. It is the satellite images working in conjunction with all of this other information that we put into these machine learning models.
Andrew Savage: That's fantastic. That's a great explanation, Ollie. Thanks for that. And yeah, I guess the thought of satellites just screaming around and taking photos and solving all our problems, you've explained it.
It's a multi-pronged approach. And again, a lot of these technologies are as good as their interaction with the people in the business as well, obviously entering grazings and recording information timely.
So yeah, it's the same with a lot of collar technologies and that type of thing. I'd love to know where you're heading with Pasture.io. I've seen on Facebook, LinkedIn, you've got a bit of a presence on social media. I get a few emails from you as well with some pretty cool information around what's happening around the place. You're sort of really up with what's happening in our industry and not just pasture, but I've seen things around biosecurity and all other types of factors that will come into it. And what's happening in the future for Pasture? I've seen some stuff around Europe and things like that.
What's the future look like?
Ollie Roberts: The future looks very green, like behind me. It's well-managed pastures, a good climate. Yeah, exactly. But you're right, Andrew, we're continuing to expand, and we drive a fairly organic sales and marketing approach. So, we're not about aggressively trying to get out there and get customers on board. It's more about trying to build awareness of what we're doing with people and with farmers and working by word of mouth. For us, it's more about delivering something of quality and something of value. Something that is actually useful and can replace the rising plate meter and also can lift farmers who've never used a rising plate meter from eyeball grazing to using pasture readings to make informed grazing decisions. For us, the future is about continuing to work with farmers in helping yourself make better grazing decisions. If we can help you relieve the mental daily decision-making burden on where you're going to graze your cows and we can do that effectively, then that is the future, and we're doing our job well. Does that resonate with yourself, Andrew, in terms of, I know you were dairy farming, and I think there is a certain element of decision-making fatigue that is put on managers in terms of every day they've got to make a decision. It could be twice a day grazing or whatever it is. I think that's underestimated how much that plays on your mind if you want to make good grazing decisions. Does that resonate?
Andrew Savage: Most definitely, and the slippery slope of a farm manager that sets their rotation in the spring and follows every paddock all the way around and doesn't deviate all spring. I think that ability to be dynamic and move with the environment and what's actually happening on the farm is where our future lies, especially for sustainability and that type of thing. We really have to look at where that next gain is, so it definitely resonates.
You've offered a lot of value to our listeners and to the people. I've found that in Tasmania, a lot of businesses are really about offering value and solving problems, and they're not really focused on the bottom line and how many subscribers have I got and that type of thing. It's a really cool culture that we have in our dairy industry that we've all got each other's backs, and that's what I love about this project as well. It's fantastic. I'd really like to know, we probably can look at wrapping things up. It's been a fantastic journey of Pasture.io and where you've come from, where you are, and where you're going, and it's a great story of your conversation from the Vat. I like how you call it the Vat. A lot of people call it the silo or whatever, so it sounds very Kiwi of you, and it's just a great story that even farmers could resonate with if they're thinking about maybe a side hustle or something that they can offer our industry. Anything's possible in this world, and I think you'd probably agree with that.
I'd love to know what key takeaway or what's one really important point that you'd love people to come away with when they're making that next step for their business.
Ollie Roberts: Yes, okay, so I could say that very, very quickly. That would be proactive and not reactive.
So, with those words, what I'm trying to say there and what I've tried to say through this whole discussion is that if you can remove the daily decision-making fatigue or you can reduce that mental daily burden, and by being proactive and not reactive, you can relieve or reduce a lot of stress in the system. If you look at the main pillars of farming, whatever they are, whatever you define them as, whether that's feed, pastures, people, finance, all of those sort of things. If you can be proactive and not reactive with your planning and strategy and tactical decision making, then things will line up, you will be happy, your animals will be happy and that's the key.
Andrew Savage: That's awesome. What a fantastic takeaway and really want to thank you very much for your time today coming to talk to us and hopefully maybe we'll get you back in here one day and we'll also bring you into the High Performance Herd journey and we'll see what we can come up with along the way. So I really want to thank you very much, much appreciated.
Ollie Roberts: Awesome. Thank you, Andrew. It's been an absolute pleasure and looking forward to watching how the High Performance Herd produces valuable information for everyone that's following.
Andrew Savage: Thank you for listening to the High Performance Herd podcast. We hope you found today's episode insightful and valuable for your dairy farming journey. A big thanks to our sponsors: Fonterra, IDEX, Kuru Diagnostics, Taz Herd, the Tasmanian Dairy Trust, Zoetis, NHIA, and DataMars for making this podcast possible.
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- The Dedicated Team of Pasture.io, 2023-01-03