OverseerFM is proving a popular tool for grouping farmers to work together to understand and lower nutrient losses.
The OverseerFM Farm Groups tool is now being used by 13,000 farms across the country to assess and better manage their farms’ nutrient losses.
Overseer business development manager Alastair Taylor says farmers are using the tool alongside their industry partners to assess farms within a water catchment group, an irrigation scheme or supplying a processor.
The Farm Groups tool provides a simple way to group individual farms together, enabling aggregated reporting and the benchmarking of nutrient losses against different aspects of the farm system such as relative stock units.
More than 100 farm groups have been created and are using the tool, including most of the corporate farming groups.
“Using the tool enables groups to make decisions based on science, not guesswork.”
Alastair Taylor
Overseer
“Farm Groups provides a convenient mechanism for farmers to collectively work together to understand and lower nutrient losses in an environment.
“It’s being well used by farm businesses managing multiple individual farms and by farms in a local area that wish to collaborate and help each other,” Taylor says.
Creating a group in Farm Groups is very easy, anyone who subscribes to OverseerFM can do it.
A group is set up based on its purpose and then farmers are invited to join that group.
There is no time limit or limit to the number of farms allowed per group and additional farms can be invited to the group at any time.
“Using the tool enables groups to make decisions about nutrient management based on science, not guesswork.”
In subscribing to OverseerFM farmers or growers can identify how efficiently nutrients are being used on their farm, their level of losses into the environment and what is needed to maintain fertility to support their current production levels.
OverseerFM’s science model is not designed to provide an exact measurement of a single year’s losses, but arelative estimate of the annual nutrient losses on a farm over time, based on the farm’s management approach.
“The results should be used to understand the relative impact of a farm system and to monitor change over time as farm practice changes,” Taylor says.
