Measuring pasture cover accurately with your smartphone is now a reality for dairy farmers in the Waikato.  

AIMER Vision was launched by Aimer Farming in September for farmers across the Waikato. A 360-degree video from a smartphone enables Vision to estimate the pasture cover of paddocks.

“The ability to now measure pasture covers quickly, easily and cost effectively via Vision is a game changer for farmers wanting to improve pasture management,” says Jeremy Bryant, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Aimer Farming.  

Using machine learning, Vision has learnt what different pasture covers look like through a video lens of a smartphone camera.  

“During development in the Waikato, we have achieved accuracies of 80% of pasture covers within 200 kg dry matter per hectare of a platemeter measurement, and the rest of covers being within 400 kg dry matter per hectare of a platemeter measurement. As we add more covers to train Vision, its accuracy will improve even more” says Jeremy.  

Aimer Farming is on a mission to unlock profit on farm, save farmers time, and close skilled labour gaps. The kiwi start-up recently launched at Fieldays® giving New Zealand farmers nationwide access to AIMER, an artificial intelligence enabled digital assistant and operating system for pastoral farming.  

AIMER uniquely learns about paddocks on farm and allows farmers to carry out rapid part farm walks, generates insights to optimise pasture management, and auto-generates paddock grazing and supplement plans for each mob on the farm.

Improving accuracy of pasture cover estimation is a critical first step to increasing farm profitability.  

Work completed by DairyNZ in 2018 showed that regular and accurate pasture cover estimation, and better pasture decision making has the potential to improve operating profit by $385 to $525 per hectare. For an average sized farm this is worth $60,000 to $80,000 of additional profit.  

Better decision making includes closer matching of feed supply with demand, grazing the longest paddocks first rather than in a set order, hitting post graze targets consistently, and only feeding supplements when needed and profitable.  

“Every extra kg of dry matter intake from improved pasture management has a positive impact on a farm’s profitability,” Jeremy adds. “Using pasture first and taking away the pain of generating an optimised grazing plan makes AIMER invaluable to stay on top of pasture quality while optimising feed intakes.”

For a limited time, a two-month trial of AIMER and Vision is being offered in the Waikato for $300 excl. GST. Book a no obligation demo here to get started.

If you are outside the Waikato region, register your interest here and we'll alert you when AIMER Vision is available for your region.

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