The government is to provide $1.6 million funding to the Canterbury region to support a goal of having 95 percent of farmers in the region connected to broadband services and to boost the value of agricultural production in the region.
Farmer-owned co-operative Ravensdown has introduced a set of online benchmarking and forecasting tools that it says will help farmers make smarter nutrient decisions by showing planned versus actual nutrient investments over time.
According to a post on the NZTech blog, Spark is partnering with NIWA, Farmlands, and Ballance Agri-Nutrients to launch an Internet of Things pilot for farmers, starting with about 40 farms in the Matamata-Piako region, with a further 20 farms to be added in the South Island.
When Peter Burggraaff joined Farmers as CIO three years ago he developed a three to five-year IT plan to reduce costs, improve business processes and customer service. Most parts of that initial plan has already been delivered. An integrated ERP system (SAP) has been introduced; SOA has been introduced as the company’s base application architecture and Microsoft SQL for Business Intelligence Platform, BizTalk and Visual Studio have been rolled out.
A recent survey of Southland and Otago farmers showed 83% have PCs
Bank expects to re-coup development costs of Ag-Benchmark