| 17 nzdairy DAIRY GOATS » Tiddy Partnership milk formula hit by covid pandemic Young Moss Tiddy is right at home on the farm. A challenge issued during a dairy discussion group to Chris Lewis of BakerAg two decades ago resulted in the creation of Dairy Systems Monitoring (DSM) software-based tool. DSM is a near real-time tool that takes inancial and production information through the milking season, showing farmers each month how they are tracking against their budget and, if they wish, against other farms that are using the DSM. The program was developed in 1999 as New Zealand dairy farming stakeholders started asking important questions about farm systems, a ordability of higher feeding levels and relative pro itability across farms. The Pirinoa (southern Wairarapa) discussion group challenged Chris Lewis to develop a way to provide an apples-for-apples comparison of physical and inancial performance for di erent farms. Twenty-three years later the tool has become a comprehensive service. Two essential points embedded in the original tool have remained and are an important point of di erence when compared to other benchmarking tools: • DSM is a tool to analyse the current season being farmed rather than looking backwards at what has happened. • DSM is not anonymous. Because members, with agreed rules around con identiality, see each other’s information with names at the top of each column, there is no hiding the truth. With this tool and service, participants can see how they are performing against planned results, why there are di erences and what their peers are achieving. Originally, all the reporting was via a spreadsheet, but that was soon outmoded. In the early 2000s Macfarlane Rural Business, through Jeremy Savage, joined forces with BakerAg and invested into the DSM website which collated the data and generated the reports. The next tranche of development was to join FARMAX with the DSM website. The power of this collective technology meant farmmodels and scenario planning were backed up by valid data. Farm-to-farm comparison can be within a consultancy irm, across a group of participating irms, across a region, by farm system type and virtually any other grouping of farms. This huge pool of in-season farm system information with like analysis gives vital insights into what makes for successful farm systems, in real time. The data and analysis are collected in a consistent manner across irms and the monthly nature of the reporting process means there is a constant stream of decision support information. Other consultancy irms that have since joined this collective are Ag irst, Transform Agri and Terry Carr of Agriconsult. DSM is transitioning to full control by FARMAX as they step up to lead the next stage of development which rolls out more analysis and reporting, including environmental indices. Dairy Systems Monitoring
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