Hi-tech tools tap profit from hard hills

Wairarapa hill country farmers Matt and Lynley Weth of Spring Valley Farm.

Take a scenic drive 10 minutes west of Masterton in Wairarapa and you'll be greeted with a rustic sign announcing Spring Valley farms. Deep in the Kaituna valley, it's the home of Matt and Lynley Wyeth and their two sons.

Spring Valley Enterprises farms roughly 10,000 sheep and another 4000 stock units made up of 300 Angus breeding cows. It sits on 1600 hectares of hard hill country with some decent quality flat lands. It consistently rates in the top 5 per cent of performers in the red meat industry, in part due to its early adoption of agri-tech.

The Wyeths employ a range of technology each with a specific, measurable outcome that allows them to make small tweaks, accumulatively, to save money.

For instance, they use a drone to keep fuel costs down and minimise animal disturbance, and a GPS system to determine the exact quantities needed for seasonal crop spraying, with zero waste.

Some tech benefits simply save time or energy, like their investment in a conveyor which allows multiple health treatments to be administered to an animal in one stop, without the need to physically restrain them, a process that used to be exhausting and time-consuming for staff.

"We want our staff to go home after work and kick the ball with their kids. If you go back to the old system where they had to bend their back most of the day drenching and vaccinating stock, it's a lot harder on them. It's investing in a bit of staff retention and kit to make life easier on the farm," Mr Wyeth said.

He credits data crunching as the biggest saving of all. He uses Farm IQ, a farm management system to pull together all the information he collects in the field which traces each individual animal including monitoring their health treatments, diet, pedigree and day-to-day weight gains. Using this data he can compare what one mob are doing versus another and make subtle changes to the overall performance of the farm.

"The information we get through monitoring and measuring animals closely make sure we keep on track, or if not, it's what we've got to do to get back to hitting our goals," he said.

Spring Valley's five "team-members" are all young, tech-saavy and hungry for excellence. Farm manager Sam Vivian-Greer likens data crunching to playing a video game, each day he wants to achieve a higher score.

Mr Wyeth knows his young sons are watching on and thinks being surrounded by technology and seeing how it is used will make a career in farming attractive to them, just as his dad investing in one of the first desktop computers attracted him.

And it's just as well his sons are inspired, they'll be no shortage of work for them. In the past 12 months, Spring Valley purchased three farms and recently settled a fourth.

ANZ's Sean Stafford said technology was "enabling Matt to make better decisions on farm which is leading to better productive outcomes and better financial performance".

Mr Wyeth's advice to farmers reluctant to embrace technology: "It's like planting a tree, if you didn't do it yesterday, today's the next best option."