Ollie Roberts has more than 10 year’s experience managing pasture - and he is keen to enhance other farmers’ management with software he has developed.
Ollie, 30, grew up on a 500-cow dairy farm in Tasmania’s north west. It was while concurrently studying his Bachelor of Agriculture and an MBA that he developed an innovative solution to help farmers make better management decisions when grazing their cows.
The mission of his web application, Pasture.io, is to revolutionise pasture management by providing farmers with a platform that lets them take greater control of their operation, for increasing farm productivity and profitability.
“Farmers measure their pasture covers (biomass) and then input that data into Pasture.io,” Ollie said.
The resulting metrics allow farmers to make better decisions about where they’re going to graze their cows to meet their production targets. My program connects the animals with pasture by integrating ruminant nutrition with the feedbase of pasture, which no other program does.
“By doing so, farmers can maintain better cow health, increase cow production and essentially they can cheaply grow more nutritious pasture.”
Pasture.io is accessible by phone, tablet or computer and can be used in the paddock, at home, or while travelling.
Ollie said the idea for the application came when he saw a gap where software to support pasture management would be helpful.
“When I first started grazing pasture in 2006, there was a lot of data…and I wasn’t sure that I was even utilising it effectively. I embarked on this journey of teaching myself how to make complex and powerful spreadsheets and workbooks.
But he found that in time, his spreadsheets ultimately grew to be overly complicated, cumbersome and still didn’t utilise the data in the most helpful way.
“You couldn’t easily give other people the spreadsheet to work with. And it was very limited in the power of databasing, in regards to being able to manipulate and pull data out of different areas."
So Ollie combined his farming expertise with his entrepreneurial spirit, and developed Pasture.io, which is already a hit with farmers.
The feedback from people within the industry has been really positive. People haven’t seen this function before in a pasture management application.
University of Tasmania student Ollie Roberts is helping farmers manage their pasture better with a web application he created.
Richard Duniam a dairy farmer from Sisters Creek, enjoys using the program.
Pasture.io doesn’t lock you into any management style, but encourages you to be a better farmer by providing tools to allow sound grazing decisions to be made that are not possible to do on the fly, he said.
“It not only helps manage growing and grazing pasture, but also assists in balancing the ration to optimise feed intakes for maximising your inputs.”
For now Ollie has his hands full with Pasture.io, finishing his MBA, caring for his young family, and working on the farm.
But studying by distance gives him a good level of flexibility.
“The distance option gives me more time to continue to work on Pasture.io.
It baffles me that it has taken this long for someone to develop something like this, and that it was me in the end.
Ollie’s busy life doesn’t stop there, as he has hinted at additional developments.
“Watch this space, as I am currently developing another web application based on forecasting milk production for farmers, which will essentially compliment Pasture.io while standing alone in its own right,” Ollie said.
PhD scholarship applications are open. Visit: http://www.utas.edu.au/research/degrees/scholarships