Robert Rigney (Farm Owner)
Robert Rigney owns and operates three dairy farms in central Tasmania with his family. With a keen eye on pastures, having spent years measuring all three farms with a C-Dax tow behind (quad) pasture meter, Robert now relies on our automatic (satellite) pasture measurement service.
Farm Enterprise:
3x dairy farms
Farming Region:
Cressy, Tasmania, Australia
Milking Platform:
923 hectares
Herd Size:
2,200 milking cows
Irrigation:
Premoninantly centre pivot
Calving System:
Spring calving
Measuring device:
Automatic (satellite) pasture measurements
EVI satellite image, which is one of the many indices used used on Delmont.
EVI satellite image, which is one of the many indices used used on Macquarie Dairy.
EVI satellite image, which is one of the many indices used used on Newham Park.
Robert Rigney (left) with his son Edward and father Allen (right) walking through one of their dairy herds.
Pasture.io is working well. We're finding it a lot more accurate this year than last year. Just by comparing the odd plate metering and all that sort of stuff, we can tell it's a lot more accurate than it ever has been and it seems to be constantly improving.
Sometimes, we take the top paddocks out of the wedge and measure them with the plate meter and check them against what Pasture io says. This is just to see if it is tracking along well. We've got a lot of trust in the system and have been using the tool for a few years now and are happy with where it's at.
Pasture.io really is a valuable tool to have, it helps me save time and it's getting better with age.
For me personally, it's taken the time out of measuring our three dairy farms, as I used to use the CDax which I've stopped now. That was basically 6 hours of my time every week that I now have to do something else! 6 hours was on a good day too.
Not to mention wear and tear, fuel and the extra time to deal with the manual measurements and the time to drive between properties. I’ve calculated that just 6 hours of measuring a week is about $11,000 in labour savings for one farm. That is over 300% return on my investment (subscription fees) in the Pasture.io platform.
Robert Rigney (left) with his brother George amongst one of their dairy herds.
Pasture.io makes things more automated and I'd say it's definitely, for time management, really good.
We find the app a great education for our staff as well, so they can go and visualise what the numbers are in the app and then go and see what is happening in the paddock. I can also see what is happening across our 3 farms and this helps me get a better understanding of where we're at, not to mention everyone else who uses the tool to know where cows are going, fert is being spread and all those things.
Pasture.io keeps a record of days grazed and all that sort of stuff around your pasture numbers and the fertiliser records are very handy too. We don't use it for the production of cows. But, for the pasture side of things, it's doing the job we need.
Just in terms of time management and record-keeping, you can look up what paddocks have been grazed, how many days and when and all that sort of stuff. So, in effect, it is being profitable. The tool does cost X amount to have the yearly subscription, but I'm not planning on stopping it tomorrow which is saying that it does have a return on our investment.
It's definitely helping save expenses and time, so, that is directly helping our profit margins. Time-saving and helping our profit are big winners for Pasture.io