New Zealand dairy farmers will be able to download data from a satellite detailing their farm's grass growth next milking season, a research funding agency says.
Dairy company Fonterra is completing field trials of an Australian "pastures from space" system, which uses satellites orbiting at 700km to estimate theamount of feed available in individual paddocks.
Precise estimates would help farmers with fertiliser applications, grazing rotation and feed budgeting.
Peter Bodeker, the chief executive of dairy industry research agency Dairy Insight, said he expected the commercial service to help farmers improve pasture management.
Bodeker said it was a "travesty" the majority of farmers were unable to easily and accurately measure how much grass was growing on their farm at a given time.
The solution lay in satellite near-infrared technology developed by countries such as the United States and Russia to spy on each other, which could be used to measure the biomass in a farmer's field.
"That technology can do a pretty accurate job," he said.
The pastures-from-space work of Fonterra was aimed at 90 per cent accuracy. It would be able to specify the grass growth in a specific paddock, or even a specific square metre of a paddock.
"I see it being available to dairy farmers within 18 months as a commercial operation," he said.
He was not sure whether the satellite would pick up variations in pasture but said the resolution was likely to be good enough to highlight, say, a cannabis patch planted at the back of a farm.
