Early school leaver Jon Jackson doesn't let a lack of classroom learning get in the way of soaking up technology and innovation for the family's Tinwald fertiliser spreading operation. Photo / Tim Cronshaw
When Jon Jackson reached school-leaving age he couldn't get out of the classroom fast enough.
That hasn't stopped him from learning or becoming a technology leader in his field.
He doesn't rate himself as "book-smart", but does accept that his strong suit is persevering with a project to make it happen.
"I left school when I just turned 15 and Mum got a dispensation for me to leave and I was out of there.
"I hated the place, absolutely hated it. I did a small motor course I had to do for leaving school, just a YMCA course. It had to be some sort of learning so I did that to get my ticket out of there."
Today, he runs a variable rate fertiliser spreading company with his wife, Anna, and parents Alan "Dusty" and Alison Jackson.
The family business, Jackson Spreading, started in 2013 when Jackson senior took a leap of faith after driving trucks for nearly 50 years.
Longstanding relationships meant he had a lot of farmers supporting him when he went out by himself.
The agreement was that Jon and Anna would buy into the business 50:50 when he got busy.
Six months later and another truck and set of hands were needed and the business of two became a partnership of four.
They still have a photo hanging on the office wall of the first Nissan truck and trailer — which has long since been replaced by a modern fleet.
Jackson said he was happy managing a run-off block, but working with his parents was too good of an opportunity to miss.
His own somewhat unconventional journey to managing a business detoured from the usual go-to-university and get a degree passage.
After leaving school early, he went dairy farming, when junior staff were paid "peanuts".
That put him off dairying so he switched to crop farming up the road from their Tinwald headquarters only to leave when the farmer's son told him they were converting to dairy farming.
A shift to working for an inter-row spraying contractor was followed by a four-year stint in earthmoving, helping a mate build up a business.
Then he went back to work for the son who converted the dairy farm to run their young stock block of 1200 stock units.
He was enjoying that until another change saw him working with his dad in the family business.
In hindsight, he could see that working all these different jobs helped him become a better contractor.
"Everything right through from my farming background to earthmoving and understanding working with the soil has been really useful.
"Understanding what farmers face and we face as contractors, it's all helped."
They spread variable-rate fertiliser, initially mainly superphosphate and potassium on cropping farms.
A spreading file is fed into the computer in the truck cab, which shows a paddock split into zones based on soil tests provided by farmers and their agronomists.
Fertiliser is then spread at different rates across the field, without the operator manually having to change rate settings or making multiple passes over an area.
His dad was up to play with this technology as he'd been there from its onset and they put it into their first and following trucks, Jackson said.
A few years passed with the younger Jackson struggling to understand why they couldn't spread nitrogen at a variable rate too.
Grid testing for nitrogen in the soil is expensive, however, and it's difficult to get an accurate gauge on deep-soil nitrogen, as a test showing there's plenty of it in soils can change rapidly with heavy rain.
Events took a turn when they went to a field day hosted by TopCon, an optical positioning company. They gravitated to its nitrogen-sensing cameras.
"I was hesitant when I first saw it and got it explained to me," Jackson said.
"It wasn't until I got in the tractor during the field day and saw it happening on the screen that I got it.
"When you get out in the tractor and look out the window to see all the high and low bits in the grass and then look to the screen as you are passing them and the truck changes the rate, that just told me this is the way to go."
Mounted cameras near the truck wing mirrors emit short light pulses which are instantly beamed down to the grass, identifying biomass, and crop health via its colour and chlorophyll content.
Then an algorithm making a decision on how much fertiliser should be spread bounces back to the variable-rate spreading computer.
The more biomass and colour showing, the less fertiliser it gets as the truck travels about 25kmh along dairy and grazing block pastures.
"That means we aren't putting it where it doesn't need it. There's plenty of nitrogen there so why put more there?
"It's an environmental benefit and it can be a financial saving, but most people like it because they get more grass, which is a financial benefit. That's because we bring up the lower-performing parts of the paddock to meet the high parts."
Jackson called the nitrogen-sensing cameras a "relatively expensive undertaking" with the sensors and computer for one truck worth $50,000.
They've got four units mounted in their fleet of three truck and trailers and a John Deere 155hp tractor, which also carries Spikey technology. But the payoff made them worthwhile, he said.
The family has just completed a four-year trial with Lincoln Agritech.
During the trial, variable-rate applications of nitrogen using the cameras were compared with blanket spreading across parts of the paddock.
Trial pastures were then measured with a C-Dax pasture meter to eventually show that another half a tonne of grass per hectare could be gained.
To put that into context, the average farmer around Tinwald's highly fertile soils might produce 18t/ha to 20t/ha.
Alongside the dry matter gain, the trial showed pasture biomass can vary by 35 per cent across a paddock.
At one farm the variable-rate application yielded about an extra $150 a hectare, with lower nitrate leaching another benefit.
On the screen, a colour-coded map with various shades indicates if more or less nitrogen is needed. Every single colour is a variable-rate change.
Often the map colouring by CropSpec can be telling.
"You can see by the colours that this will be a lane and these blue and green parts will be high in nitrogen and these red bits will be deficient. The yellow will be a mid-range.
"We can see the green colour around a trough where the cows have been standing and there's heaps of nitrogen because the cows have all stood there and done their business.
"This comes up in the truck and we can see a first break or second break or if it's rained and the cows have been standing by trees."
The trucks then spread the fertiliser at the farmer's targeted rate under a cap of 190kg a ha per season.
This is split into perhaps eight applications, spread only where they're needed, over the course of a year.
The Jacksons were the first contractors to adopt the technology and they've since been joined by a handful of others.
The results have made even the healthiest sceptics believers.
"I would get the farmers in the truck and say 'look at this'. I've had some sceptical ones and the best one was a farmer friend of ours. He was very sceptical and said, 'nah I don't need it'.
"There was young wheat and the paddock just looked beautiful. I offered to run it over to see the results and he went 'Nah, nah, look at that paddock, it's perfect'.
"So I had the cameras on and got him to look at the map. The farm had been changed with two paddocks, a track and a line of trees through the middle with an old water race.
"You could see where nitrogen wasn't needed where the lane was and under the trees or the high bits where the cows had stood on the old creek line.
"He just about fell out of the cab. It's not always what it looks and that was a classic example."
The technology was used now for all of their farming customers, he said.
A leaning towards any technological advance has seen him win the New Zealand Groundspread Fertiliser Association's Innovation Award.
One of the latest additions can be credited initially to his wife's 95-year-old grandmother who - mesmerised by all this technology - took a cutting of a newspaper write-up about a product called Spikey.
This was passed on to the couple in December 2020 as she knew this would spark their interest.
Spikey passes over a paddock and sprays a nitrification inhibitor called NitroStop after identifying fresh urine patches using sensors built into spikes.
The spikes just penetrate the surface of the soil and the machine puts on a chemical to prevent the creation of nitrous oxide.
At the same time, it applies just the right amount of fertiliser to other parts of the paddock, via N-sensing cameras.
Spikey was founded by farmers Geoff Bates and Lachlan McKenzie after nitrogen leaching into Lake Rotorua became a problem.
The next month, after reading the article, Jackson headed up to see them and bought a machine, adapted so he could tow it behind a tractor.
A larger fertiliser hopper was added, but the machine ended up being a "fail" for commercial contracting, he said.
"The machine itself failed, but the technology didn't fail. It did a great job and grew lots of grass.
"We worked with them and built a machine that could do it, so we went from half a tonne of fertiliser to now carrying four tonnes, 2000 litres of water and the whole machine was built more rugged. So now we can punch out the hectares."
Several prototypes can be found in the Jackson yard and the latest model has spikes made of the strongest steel and arms redesigned with greater strength so it can withstand the rigours of passing over about 14,000ha a year.
Jackson estimated they'd invested $800,000 so far into the technology and a tractor to get to the finished product.
Jackson said a cow urinated about 600 units of nitrogen - for every 100kg of nitrogen, there are 46 units - compared with 15 units of N spread by trucks, so it was important that urine patches were minimised.
"So we are spreading over the top and finding the urine patches and then applying the inhibitor, which has a growth hormone to make the grass grow flat-out.
"In a lysimeter with fake urine, we can grow 10 tonne of grass in 30 days. Spikey will grow about another 20 per cent of grass over a paddock, which is a big increase."
Spikey can also spread small granular fertiliser, known as prills, which grow about 25 per cent extra grass.
This thirst for technology has seen the Jacksons move in a few different directions.
They've become dealers for the TopCon cameras fitted to Spikey and have also become a Ravensdown consignment store, as they couldn't take a machine travelling 40kmh on the road to load up in Ashburton every time it needed refilling.
So, at some expense, they built the Tinwald Ravensdown Store on the site of their lifestyle block, which means they can sell fertiliser.
The advantage for them is they can put it on a paddock before it's been despatched and charged.
Just the other day he bought an N-sensing camera for a drone that is heading its way from Switzerland. This will be the first of its kind in New Zealand.
No longer will he have to drive over and disturb silage paddocks to work out how much nitrogen is needed as this will be captured aerially. The truck only goes on after the crop is harvested to replace the nutrients.
The drone's automated by a smartphone app and he will be able to sit in the car at a corner of the paddock for 10 minutes, while its nitrogen needs are plotted out.
He said fertiliser had gotten so expensive and other costs had gone through the roof so it made sense to use technology smarter.
And he couldn't see a ceiling to this and pointed out that fenceless farms - once a pipedream - were part of farming today.
For the most part, his father understood his passion for innovation, Jackson said.
"He's on board with it.
"I think sometimes they must think 'just stop looking'. It's probably stuff their generation wouldn't have looked at.
"They didn't need to - fertiliser was cheap, the environment was the environment and it was there and wasn't going anywhere."
This approach has changed, the general consensus now being that soils are being spoiled because far too much nitrogen was put on 10 years ago.
Times had changed and the likes of Spikey could reduce leaching and break down cow patches so many of the problems would disappear, he said.
Severe weather hits as school holidays begin, with evacuations in Marlborough.