New Zealand

Boost Your Current Farm Accounting Software With This Tech

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 19:04:53 GMT

New Zealand-based ag tech company Figured wants to build upon your current farm accounting software to help you make real-time decisions.

“We want to bring the production data and information, like livestock being sold or bushels being harvested, and marry it with the financial information you already already have,” says Mitchell Parks, Figured U.S. account executive. “It creates color and insight into what’s happening on the farm so that you can make those smarter financial business decisions.”

During an episode of the Top Producer podcast, Parks and his colleague Erin Arick joined host Paul Neiffer to share how farmers can get an enhanced look at their finances through the Figured software.

Neiffer uses this analogy to describe the technology.

“With accounting software, like Xero or Quickbooks, you’re looking in the rearview mirror at historical data. Figured is designed to allow you to look through the windshield, so to speak. You’re able to use it as a management tool,” he explains.

Some of the ways you can use the software as a management tool include:

To create farm budgets
To calculate break-evens and profitability
To model long-term “what if” scenarios using different options

“You’re going to be looking at all the transactions that come through the accounting platform, and you can create profit centers to bucket those transactions where they happened on the farm. So, you can track profitability for different aspects,” Arick says.

It’s important to note Figured must be used with Quickbooks Online, not the desktop version. Other integrations are likely on the horizon as well.

“We are exploring integrations with a couple of the major producer tracking tools,” Parks says. “I’m sure we’ve all had instances where there’s been a spreadsheet with a bit of data written, and then we’ve emailed it across a couple of people, and by the time it’s come back to you, it’s not the same spreadsheet. How can we remove that from the equation? I think we can do that really well and know that we can trust that data and trust that everyone is on the same page when it comes to those financials.”

If you want to test out Figured without adding all of your farm information, the company has a U.S. demo farm that can be accessed on its website using a free login.

“It’s like a sandbox,” Arick says. “You can mess around in there to see what the outputs are and create trackers. It’s just not connected to a live QuickBooks Online file, but if you would wish to do that, you can create a trial and connect it to your QuickBooks Online or Xero file.”

Catch up on episodes of the Top Producer podcast

Dairy Farm Sustainability Through Technological Innovation

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 12:00:00 GMT

By Stuart Taylor: Canterbury, New Zealand

Cows outnumber Kiwis here in New Zealand. It’s close, but there are more dairy cows than there are people in our country.

The big herds are fine with us because their production drives much of our economy. New Zealand may look isolated on a map, adrift in the south Pacific Ocean, but we are a trading nation that constantly exchanges goods and services with the rest of the world—and about a quarter of our exports come from dairy farms.

As we continue to build our country’s dairy production, we’re also determined to lead the way in sustainability through technological innovation. Our future depends on it.

Cows generate methane, which contributes to the rising temperatures of climate change. Dairy farmers in New Zealand, therefore, have an obligation to come up with creative solutions to this problem.

We think we have found one, thanks to EcoPond, a treatment system that removes almost all the methane emissions from effluent ponds.

An ordinary dairy cow on a typical day produces about 70 liters of effluent, which is a euphemism for waste, which is a euphemism for words that I’m not going to print.

Traditionally, a cow’s effluent flows into a stabilization pond , where it receives treatment before its release. On our farm, we use much of this liquid to feed our soil.

This process works well, but one of the byproducts of effluent ponds is the release of methane into the atmosphere. So effluent ponds can create a challenge—but they also represent an opportunity to do better.

In a research breakthrough driven by a collaboration between farmers and scientists, a co-op called Ravensdown partnered with professors at Lincoln University on New Zealand’s South Island to create EcoPond , a product that could transform effluent treatment everywhere. We’re one of two dairy farms that are now experimenting with EcoPond. Ours has 1,100 cows and exclusively produces milk.

The concept of EcoPond is simple. It intercepts effluent as it drains out of a cowshed and pumps it into a mixing coil, where it receives an injection of iron sulfate. Then the effluent flows into what by outward appearances is a standard effluent pond. But this is an effluent pond with an important difference: The iron sulfate makes it impossible for microorganisms to emit methane.

“What we found is the EcoPond technology can reduce methane emissions by 99.9 percent,” says Hong Di, a scholar of soil and environmental science at Lincoln University.

He adds, with a smile: “We’re still working on the 0.1 percent. We’ll get there.”

EcoPond delivers additional benefits. It reduces the leaching of phosphate and E. coli by 90 percent or more. It improves the carbon content of our soil. And it even smells better than a traditional effluent pond.

It’s also easy to operate. After setting it up, farmers don’t have to give it much attention. The system monitors iron sulfate levels on its own and makes necessary adjustments.

For all its advantages, however, EcoPond is only a partial solution to the challenge of cutting methane, which has many sources on dairy farms, including cow burps.

We’ve discovered during our trial period that EcoPond wipes out about 8 percent of our total methane emissions. This is an excellent result, but not a complete strategy, as we’re aiming to cut emissions by 35 percent by 2035. We’ll need to look beyond our effluent ponds to achieve the next 27 percent.

I’m confident that we can get there, but I also expect to try a lot of methods. One is to alter the mix of microorganisms that assist with digestion in the bellies of cows. Right now, these bugs emit significant amounts of methane. By changing the diets of cows, we will be able to maintain their nutrition and cut methane emissions at the same time.

Separately, we’re trying to improve our sustainability by shifting away from electric power and taking up renewables such as solar and hydro.

For now, we’re pleased with the start that EcoPond has given us—and confident that new technologies can build upon this success and take us the rest of the way.

Stuart Taylor is a dairy farmer, managing the dairy and grazing operations for Craigmore Sustainables in Canterbury and North Otago, New Zealand. Stuart is a member of the Global Farmer Network. This column originates at www.globalfarmernetwork.org

Pacific Nations Agree to Save TPP Trade Pact

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 01:35:28 GMT

(Bloomberg) -- The 11 remaining members of a Pacific trade pact abandoned by U.S. President Donald Trump have reached a deal on a revised agreement, with the nations to work toward signing the deal by early March, according to Singapore’s government.

Senior officials resolved outstanding issues, finalized the list of suspended provisions and completed the legal verification of the agreement, concluding negotiations on what has been renamed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, Singapore’s trade ministry said Tuesday in a statement.

The deal was reached after two days of talks in Tokyo, and came just hours after Trump imposed tariffs on imported solar panels and washing machines -- his first major move to level what he says is a global playing field tilted against U.S. companies. The whole agreement looked like it might collapse after contentious negotiations in November, when Canada’s participation was thrown into doubt.

Japan’s Economy Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said Canada has agreed to work toward approving the deal, and he believed they would follow through on that.

“Today, Canada and the 10 other remaining members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership concluded discussions in Tokyo, Japan, on a new Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Joe Pickerill, director of communications for Canadian Trade Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, said Tuesday in an email.

The agreement comes at a pivotal time for Canada, the second-largest economy in the pact after Trump quit. The country is in the midst of talks to update the North American Free Trade Agreement, the trilateral accord with the U.S. and Mexico that Trump is also threatening to quit. Part of the Canadian response to U.S. Nafta threats has been to push to expand trade ties elsewhere, including Asia.

The original Trans Pacific Partnership, which would have covered 40 percent of the global economy, was seen as a guarantee of U.S. involvement in Asia and a counterweight to Chinese clout -- an idea thrown into disarray when Trump withdrew in one of his first acts as president. Japan has led a scramble to keep the deal alive, with the hope of enticing the U.S. to return at a later date.

“The CPTPP will enhance trade among countries in the Asia-Pacific, resulting in more seamless flows of goods, services, and investment regionally,” Singaporean Trade Minister Lim Hng Kiang was quoted as saying.

Of the four remaining issues left after the talks in Vietnam in November, the sections of the deal Brunei and Malaysia had a problem with will be frozen, Motegi said. Matters involving Vietnam’s labor rights and Canada’s cultural goods will be dealt with in side letters, which each country agreed to sign separately to the CPTPP deal, he said.

Pickerill said Canada achieved “a significant outcome on culture and an improved arrangement on autos with Japan along with the suspension of many IP provisions of interest to Canadian stakeholders,” referring to intellectual property provisions.

The following countries make up the agreement: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.