Design of a Portable Pasture Quality Meter

Abstract

Pastures are the cheapest and the main source of feed for New Zealand’s dairy, sheep and beef animals. Since dairy, sheep and beef industry has a significant impact on New Zealand’s economy so pasture farms should be carefully observed and properly managed. The nutritional needs of animals vary at different growth stages and has a direct effect on animals performance, health and milk production thus, to provide a suitable diet to animals farmers should be aware of pasture quality so that if the nutrients are not adequate then supplements can be added in their diet. Pasture yield information is also very helpful in estimating the regrowth rate of pasture, seasonal yield of each paddock and in making decisions such as determining future feed budgets, fertilizer needs etc. Thus, in order to get optimal profit farmers should be aware of the quality and yield of pasture on their farms. The current systems for estimating these parameters are labour intensive and time consuming as farmers have to survey paddocks and take a lot of samples for better accuracy. Therefore there is a need to develop an automated system that can estimate these parameters in real time. The objective of the proposed research was to develop a portable pasture quality meter that can be used as a stand-alone device with its own positioning and computing systems. The device developed in this research is very flexible and can be used either as a hand-held meter or installed in an unmanned/manned vehicle. It has a bluetooth interface which can either be used to connect it with a smart phone application to view the results or with a fertilizer/persticide spraying system. Though the focus of this research is on pastures only but with some modifications, it can also be used for estimating quality and yield of other crops. Therefore, the quality meter developed in this research can potentially draw considerable interest and funding from the agricultural sector.