Level up your pasture management

In this article, we take a look at the ways Halter can help you level-up your pasture management during late-winter and spring.

Managing pasture from late winter through to the end of spring is critical to the performance of your farm. The strategies you employ and the decisions you make during this period, amongst the stress of calving and mating, can make or break your season. With every extra tonne of pasture harvested/ha typically worth ~$300 profit/ha, growing and utilising more grass this season has significant financial upside for your operation.

Halter’s solar-powered smart collars and mobile app enable you to monitor cow health, virtually fence and remotely shift your cows. The system also provides you with advanced data visualisation and decision-making tools that unlock better pasture management on your farm.

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Maximise the productivity of your pasture and herd with virtual fencing.

Achieve your average pasture cover targets with spring rotation planning.

Take advantage of surpluses and maintain high pasture quality.

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Maximise the productivity of your pasture and herd with virtual fencing.

A key challenge through calving and spring is accurately planning and executing grazings for multiple mobs, ensuring that required pasture allocations are balanced with growth rates and target round lengths. A highly manual job that is hard to get right when things are constantly changing.

Farmers using Halter are able to plan precise virtual breaks for each mob, allocating the kgDM/m2 of pasture required by each cow at every grazing and each day, while also balancing this with clear visibility of their round length and growth rates. This ensures farmers are always making the best possible decisions to maximise the productivity of both their animals and their pasture. Using Halter, breaks can be planned for grazing on specific days, up to a week in advance, and will automatically save to each cow's collar ahead of the assigned grazing date.

Every break is easily adjustable up until grazing to ensure farmers are responding to changes in mob sizes during calving, or variable weather conditions. Any time a change is made, farmers have immediate visibility of how those changes affect the kgDM/m2 allocations to each cow and the round length / area allocated across the herd that day.

Petra Burgess, a farm manager in Te Awamutu, has seen a stark contrast between management before and after getting the Halter system. Petra’s experience has been that “virtual break creation optimises intakes and residuals each day, therefore also optimising feed quality and subsequent growth rates. These were roughly planned before and rarely altered.”

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Spring rotation planning to achieve your average pasture cover targets.

From the start of spring calving through to balance date, farmers must keep a close eye on their average pasture cover across the farm and tightly manage their daily pasture allocation and round length. Without Halter, this typically requires a huge amount of manual planning, record-keeping and number-crunching across multiple locations.

This season, farmers are using Halter as a spring rotation planner, setting targets for start of calving and balance date and relying on the app to calculate their actual round length and average pasture cover on the farm every day over this period.

Halter automates these calculations based on measured pasture covers on the farm, forecasted growth rates and virtually fenced breaks that are grazed each day. Using the app to visualise how they are progressing against their planned targets each day and week, farmers are well positioned to ensure they are on track or make adjustments and course correct quickly where required.

All of this helps farmers to hit balance date knowing that they have optimised the first grazing rotation and can move into late spring with high pasture quality and growth potential, setting them up for a strong, productive season.

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“Halter’s rotation planner is excellent – rather than waiting for the start of spring to incorporate targets, we’ve fixed them in early alongside the live round length tracking – it’s going to save a lot of pain this calving”

— Pete Morgan, Halter farmer

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Staying a step ahead to take advantage of surpluses and maintain high pasture quality.

Keeping in control of pasture growth in spring to harvest surpluses and maintain high quality pasture is a difficult challenge. It involves a lot of time and effort to get this right, both from a forecasting and execution perspective.

Halter’s smart wedge leverages both pasture cover measurements and projected growth rates to provide farmers with a live view of pasture covers vs demand/target line, grazing intervals and feed available (in total and per mob).

This enables farmers to identify paddocks that are best for each mob to graze and those expected to exceed optimum pre-grazing cover – to determine how many paddocks should be harvested as silage while also optimising the quantity and quality of pasture on hand to graze.

Fraser Hasnip, an owner operator in Pirongia who used Halter last spring, says "I have been able to utilise the pasture much better, leading to more pasture consumed and more silage being harvested from surpluses. Back fencing every break showed increased growth, especially noticeable during the spring peak”.

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