Every Meat & Livestock Australia member will soon have voluntary access to monthly estimates of available feed on offer to better inform business decision making.

The planned new service roll-out, a first of its type at scale for any livestock sector in the world, is part of a major new partnership between Meat & Livestock Australia and Cibo Labs.

Doug McNicholl, MLA’s program manager for sustainability innovation, addresses last week’s BeefUp forum in Cloncurry.

The initiative, which is aimed at accelerating national adoption of objective measurement technology at farm level, was briefly discussed at MLA’s Beefup Forum at Cloncurry late last week.

It is understood that arrangements are being finalised ahead of a planned formal announcement in coming weeks.

MLA is partnering with satellite mapping and agricultural data analytics provider Cibo Labs to provide the service which will turn satellite data into actionable insights for producers.

Via the new partnership, levy-paying MLA members will be able to access an entry-level service including satellite imagery of their properties, and monthly estimates of feed availability.

Producers will be able to opt-in or opt-out from participating.

Objective measurement innovations have been applied to the red meat supply chain in recent years, such as sensing and scanning technology to improve the accuracy of carcase assessments.

MLA program manager – Sustainability Innovation, Doug McNicholl (right) told the Cloncurry Beefup forum that the new  project will effectively bring objective measurement technology to the farm level.

MLA had been keeping track of the development of technology for estimating feed on offer for the past few years, and in May this year called for proposals from technology providers to develop a service for industry using a partnership model that leveraged matching Commonwealth Government funds via the MLA Donor Company.

It is designed to fast-track adoption of objective measurement in the paddock to take the guess work out of measuring available feed and improve decision making.

“In Australia all livestock that make their way through the production system are on grass for significant parts of life, yet the way in which we assess the availability of grass in the grazing industry is largely subjective,” he said.

“There is technology available today that can largely remove subjectivity from assessment of things like how much feed you have in your paddock.”

Mr McNicholl said Cibo Labs has developed world-leading objective technology that can help producers to assess how many kilograms of total standing dry matter they have in their paddocks, and to use that biomass data to conduct precise feed budgeting and forward planning.

“Shifting from subjective visual assessments that can have a margin of error of 100 to 200 percent into a tool that has a very high accuracy relative to human assessment and gives you much confidence to make decisions.”

Mr McNicholl said the data will potentially be made available through a platform such as “My MLA” where produces who opt-in will receive a monthly feed-on-offer assessment for their farm.

The service could also provide a national snapshot of available feed to inform industry wide planning going into or coming out of wet and dry sesasons, and be delivered alongside MLA’s existing seasonal outlook projections.

One barrier to greater uptake of ag tech innovations has been identified as the lack of a uniform national system of digital mapping.

Current digital mapping in use on Australian livestock farms originates from a range of different providers, with a wide variance in quality and cross-platform functionality.

It has been described as modern agriculture’s ‘rail gauge’ issue.

In the 19th century fledgling Australian colonies chose different gauges for their own railways. The differences in gauges became problematic as railway networks grew and trains needed to cross state lines, resulting in extensive delays as passengers and freight were transferred to another train, or train wheels were changed to accommodate the different gauge.

A uniform system of farm mapping that enables different technologies to “talk to each other” and eases integration of a wide range of specialist farm management tools can provide a platform to utilise commercially available tech such as farm management dashboards and remote sending and monitoring applications, and to help propel enterprises seeking to pursue carbon accounting and revenue generating activities along that path.