42 | nzdairy DAIRY PEOPLE » Premier Dairies Ltd App brings many farming tools together Karen Phleps A need for a simpler way to manage farm information has led Premier Dairies contract milker Janamjot Singh Ghuman and his wife Mandeep Kaur to develop a new app designed to bring a wide range of farming tools together in one place. Farmithm has been more than a year in development and testing with Janamjot and Mandeep using it on Premier Dairies farms before sharing it with a couple of friends. They passed it on to others and, before long, around 50 people were using it. The couple are now hoping to officially launch the app before the end of the year. “We just needed an app and there was nothing where we could do everything in one place,” says Janamjot. “It’s not just fixed my problem now; it will be fixing other people’s problems as well.” Farmithm has been designed as an all-in-one platform for dairy, beef, sheep, lifestyle blocks and contractors, with functions covering pasture management, compliance, artificial intelligence (AI) insights, team management and invoicing. For dairy farmers, the pasture and grazing tools provide a live paddock map, cover tracking, rotation planning and geofenced grazing zones. Farmers can also use photographs to help assess pasture cover and body condition scoring with AI providing analysis and suggestions based on the information entered into the system. The app’s AI Advisor is intended to go beyond simply storing information by using a farm’s paddocks, herd, feed stocks and seasonal history to provide advice specific to that operation. “It can look at the data and give you answers based on your farm rather than giving you generic information,” explains Janamjot. Other functions include animal health records, milk and feed records, ration planning, fertiliser application records, health and safety meetings, incident reporting, standard operating procedures, staff training and employment records. The platform also includes team and payroll functions, document management and invoicing. Janamjot hopes to eventually connect it with information from established industry systems. “I would like to get data into it from the likes of Fonterra and Minda as well,” he says. Janamjot Singh Ghuman and his wife Mandeep Kaur on-farm. Specialising in: • Agricultural Engineering • Dairy Shed & Yard Maintenance • Yard Design • Dairy Platform Repairs PROUDLY SERVICING SOUTHLAND FOR OVER 75 YEARS Livestock & Farm Cartage Fertiliser Spreading Contracting & Demolition Stockfeed Delivery Gravel Supply CALL NOW 03 2217 192 ryalbushtransport.co.nz A key motivation behind the project is giving farmers greater ownership and control over their information and keeping the cost accessible. “I want to build something where the data belongs to farmers, not a third party as is the case with many other tools, and I’m aiming for it to be cheap to use,” says Janamjot. The app is being developed alongside the couple’s farming careers with both bringing complementary skills to the project. Mandeep has a Master’s Degree in Information Technology and Janamjot has done some online courses in coding and IT and has a strong interest in numbers, planning and financial management. The couple currently contract milk for Premier Dairies near Invercargill, where they manage around 800 predominantly Friesian cows on a 260-hectare effective property. The farm achieved its best production record last season, producing 426,000 kilograms of milk solids. For Janamjot, Farmithm is another example of identifying a practical problem and finding a way to solve it. “We needed something that worked for us in the real world,” he says. “Now we want to make it something that can work for other farmers as well.”
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