Mark Bouma (Farm Owner)

Photo of Mark Bouma on farm checking grazing residuals

What problem were you looking to solve when you came across Pasture.io?

When I first came across Pasture.io I was looking for a management app to help with the ease of pasture management with staff.

We looked around at a few different options, but I couldn’t find anything that had everything I wanted in regards to grazing management. After signing up to Pasture.io, it took me about an hour to find my way around the program. It made sense and had everything that I wanted. It’s practical for staff to use and the satellite imagery is a bonus on top of what I was looking for too.

How has Pasture.io impacted your daily farm management?

Now that I’ve got new staff on board, I can actually sit down before we go out on farm, and look at a couple of different paddocks off the app. We’ve got the fert history right there on screen, and the days since last grazed. Using Pasture.io I can explain to my staff why we’re looking at these paddocks.

What impact does Pasture.io have on your long-term farm management?

I’ve always been interested in individual paddock performance — on our farm, we have different land types, soil types and contours but we were treating the farm as one. We were getting different grazing intervals and noticing a massive performance difference in paddocks. I thought if I could really break that down and get a real gauge on what’s happening, then we’d be able to treat that paddock differently in the future in terms of fertiliser and inputs.

With the cost of fertiliser and cost of grain through the roof, using Pasture.io means not treating every paddock the same when they’re actually not the same. It means we can fine-tune that, and there are cost savings in that. That’s gonna help us towards being more efficient, lowering cost of production, and growing more feed off it, and that’s best case scenario for us.

Over time, it’s that one central system where regardless of which staff member is running the pasture management at that particular time, we can all go in and see what’s going on. Using Pasture.io I’ll be able to forecast feed deficits ahead of time and there are plenty of tools in the platform that we’ll use going forward.

Is there anything more you’d like to add?

We are currently raising levels of certain nutrients with capital fert so being able to analyse changes in the mid- to long- term and accurately monitor what response the farm has will be incredible for our decisions moving forward .

I can definitely see the potential of using Pasture.io to grow more grass at a lower cost. It’s a cheap investment, and it means peace of mind for me too — it’s going to take a lot of guesswork out of pasture management decisions made by staff — they have all the information in front of them instead of flicking through a diary. On that side of things, it’s gonna be invaluable really.