Phil Tickle

A NEW project giving producers across the country free access to satellite pasture maps is set to go live at the end of November.

The $4.7 million collaboration between Meat & Livestock Australia and CiboLabs will be available to all levy paying red meat producers – free for MLA members and $99/year for non-members.

The Australian Feedbase Monitor will be available through the My MLA website, giving producers a one-hectare resolution estimate of pasture biomass measurement on a five-daily basis. Cibo managing director Phil Tickle said the program will take a lot of the guess work out of grazing management.

“Most producers look at the weather data on an almost daily basis to see where it has rained and what might happen with the pasture,” he said.

“But the weather stations are five, ten or fifty kilometres apart, which makes it not very accurate. This program will be able to tell you exactly where the pasture has grown.

“In terms of decisions you are going to make with stocking rates and forage budgets, this is the tool.”

Talking to the MLA Beef Up forum in Clermont at the weekend, Mr Tickle said the company’s programs were available offline and allowed producers to collect data in the field.

“Offline access is virtually standard in most of the AgTech industry now,” he said.

“You can go out in the paddock with your phone and do your pasture assessments if you are willing. You basically take your photos, GPS locations and all the other data and come home and upload it. There are also opportunities with natural capital, whether it is habitat, soil health or land condition.”

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.

Beef Central first wrote about the CiboLabs’ satellite mapping work in this article back in April last year.

• Beef Central’s free carbon and cattle market seminar at the Primex field days in Casino will have more on the CiboLabs program