A central pillar of OBE Organic’s business is helping good organic cattle producers adopt best practices, so they can build multi-generational productive and profitable grazing enterprises.
One recent example of our work in this area was a day of free NRM Spatial Hub training at Birdsville, provided with the assistance of OBE Organic and Pastoral Profit, which attracted a capacity crowd of 19 rangelands cattle producers.
The world–first technology underpinning the NRM Spatial Hub combines the latest geospatial mapping technologies with 30 years of seasonal satellite ground cover imagery to help graziers improve the sustainable management of Australia’s rangelands.
What does this mean in practice?
In the course of one day at Birdsville, the 19 graziers were given the skills needed to:
• Map their property and its infrastructure (such as buildings, water points, fences, roads, power lines etc) to a cartographic standard, using the NRM Spatial Hub’s simple web-based tool
• Assess the vegetation cover in their paddocks over the past 30 years, and compare their paddocks with neighbouring paddocks of the same land type
• Understand how to map new infrastructure, for example a topographical cross-section of a proposed new fence line so the precise amount of wire is budgeted for.
All of this gives producers better data, which allows them to make better decisions.
Have we got our carrying capacity right? Should we be investing in new infrastructure to open up new areas of the property? Can we provide better maps to workers to improve farm safety? Can I look ahead to seasonal forecasts to make more timely decisions to de-stock or re-stock?
The NRM Spatial Hub can aid all these planning and budgeting decisions … and much more.
Anyone who thinks cattle producers are reluctant adopters of technology would have received a shock if they were in Birdsville (200km to the nearest town, 1,200km to the nearest capital city) at the end of September. We know cattle producers are hungry to make the most of technology to make better decisions, and we’re very proud to have been able to help bring this training to Lake Eyre Basin cattle producers.
For more information on the NRM Spatial Hub, or to register to be able to access the NRM Spatial Hub (currently free to use), click here.
NRM Spatial Hub can instantly draw radiuses from each water point, to clearly show which areas of a property are beyond a desired walking distance to water for cattle.
