Tony and Michelle Roberts had been long-time dairy farmers before making the transition to deer and beef. Six years ago, they sold their dairy farm and made the move to Merino Downs, just north of Gore, and now they own and operate a successful velveting and trophy deer business called Top Deck Deer.
Top Deck is a 269ha farm with two halves: Top Deck Deer on one side and a dairy grazing operation on the other. Tony and Michelle manage about 350 fallow deer and 610 red deer, along with 200 Friesian X calves and 35 beef cattle. They admit that when they first started, it took them a while to adjust after living and breathing dairy farming for so long.
An all-in-one solution
Once settled into their new property, Tony wanted a program that could record all their farm information, monitor farm performance, and act as a source of truth for industry rules and regulations.
“We wanted a programme to record all the information in relation to fertiliser applications, grass species for crops, and stock tallies,” explains Tony.
For the trophy deer operation, Tony says that while his current customer base doesn't request background information on the animals, the Ministry for Primary Industries and the meat works have certain requirements and audits he needs to meet.
“Having it all in one programme for monitoring farm performance and from a regulatory point of view, we can now say we have done those [compliance] practices and here’s the proof to show we’ve done it.”
Tony says the biggest draw to FarmIQ is the data collection: “All the data is in one place, and it’s recorded under various headings making it easy to refer back to if need be.”
Michelle adds that “having a daily record of stock numbers means you can quickly jump in there and have a look. It’s all right there and it’s all up to date”.
The new mobile app is something Tony finds really useful when completing daily tasks on the farm – it's something that the FarmIQ development team has been working hard on so that our farmers can spend more time farming and less time mucking around in the office.
“It's very easy to get around the new app; you can save all your treatments that you have used before and go back in and change the batch number – no dramas with it whatsoever,” says Michelle.
“A good feature of the mobile app is that you can do everything right then and there on the spot. You can take a photo of the drench container, record the batch number, apply it to the specific mob of stock on that day and know that it’s done,” Tony adds.
"Having a daily record of stock numbers means you can quickly jump in there and have a look. It’s all right there and it’s all up to date."
Do it once, do it right
Michelle invested time at the start of their FarmIQ journey setting everything up correctly to suit their compliance and regulatory needs and now, when audit time rolls around each year, they know the key information is ready and easy to find.
“When we do an audit and they ask where our drenching records are, we can go straight to a recent one, prove that we’ve got it there – we’re not going back and checking because we know we’ve already done it,” asserts Michelle.
Tony notes that audits, like those conducted by Silver Fern Farms, are efficient, taking only an hour and a half.
“We breeze through it because all the information is in one place and easily accessible. We're not spending hours sifting through receipts and paperwork – it's an ongoing document that's updated in real-time,” he says.
The unexpected benefits of technology
A feature of FarmIQ that Tony and Michelle did not anticipate finding quite so useful was the powerful, customised farm map. Mapping is crucial for planning on-farm infrastructure such as water troughs, fences and hazard areas, and the Top Deck team can use FarmIQ to visualise and adjust farm plans based on satellite images and maps, allowing for effective preparation of new projects without having to physically go out on the farm.
“Where are we going to put that water trough and how much pipe do we need? Even the fences, we can now work out how much material we need to order down to the nearest meter,” says Tony.
FarmIQ’s integration with Gallagher has been another handy feature. Top Deck does a fair bit of stock weighing using their Gallagher unit – primarily for deer and velvet production, but also for their calves and steers.
The FarmIQ-Gallagher integration allows Michelle and Tony to do all their weights and live growth calculations at once, without jumping back and forth between different programs.
Top Deck continues to use new technologies to improve farm performance and efficiency, and Tony and Michelle are still finding new features in FarmIQ that they are yet to use, such as the integrations with Tabula and Figured.
While the transition from dairy hasn't been easy, Michelle and Tony say they have enjoyed the challenge and that FarmIQ has been invaluable in streamlining their operations with its effective compliance, data management and planning tools.
