When you need a view of how pastures grow and respond to soil, nutrients, and climate, you should consider the Pasture Growth Forecaster.
Developed by Rezare Systems in conjunction with DairyNZ and Beef+Lamb New Zealand, the pasture growth forecaster is delivered as a wholesale API that organisations and software vendors can plug into their solutions.
Pasture Growth Forecaster uses soil profile information (available water holding capacity and proxies for fertility information), historic and forecast weather data, and a mathematical model of pasture to produce its results.
Pasture Growth Forecaster is designed to power-up applications that need insights about feed availability for grazing systems, predicting both historical data and forecasting probable future growth rates. Applications include:
- Understanding long term growth rates, variability and seasonal risk for pastoral farms
- Analysing current season growth rates, including filling gaps in measured pasture biomass
- Short term (15 day) future forecasts to enable decisions about rotation speed and options
- Sub-seasonal forecasts that consider the current situation and a variety of potential growth rates.
- Paddock predictions that make use of measured data to provide net growth rates and improve forecast accuracy over time with machine learning.
Using pasture growth forecasts in your application
Solution developers can sign up to the Pasture Growth Forecaster service, using the documented API specification to create custom solutions, combining Pasture Growth Forecaster with other information to add further value for end users.
Pasture Growth Forecaster is provided through a scalable, farm-based pricing model. Monthly pricing is based on the number of farms that a solution developer or organisation has active and able to receive forecasts during each month.
To discuss how your organisation might use Pasture Growth Forecaster, and to obtain development documentation, please fill in the form below.
Good pasture management is the key to farm profitability. DairyNZ and B+LNZ are confident that pasture growth forecasts will help farmers make better decisions on supplementary feeding, grazing rotations, silage making and nitrogen management. Funded by DairyNZ, B+LNZ and the Ministry for Primary Industries through the Primary Growth Partnership.
