Credit: Dreamstime
Dunedin-based fertiliser cooperative Ravensdown is supporting smart farming and customer focus with the help of a new fleet of ruggedised Lenovo PCs.
As farmers adopt more and more sophisticated agritech software and sensor-based systems, they in turn need accessible analytics to help them achieve benefits such as higher crop yields, fewer pesticides, less nutrient run-off and greater sustainability.
Ravensdown’s team also have to be connected to New Zealand’s farms and farmers. Customer-centricity is vital, not least because the people they are advising are the same people who own the business.
Ravensdown's agri-managers deliver nutrient know-how, coupled with technical advice and environmental guidance to improve farming practices using software tools such as Overseer and Ravensdown's own map-based HawkEye software which help farmers make smarter decisions for better farm and environmental outcomes.
To support such tools, Ravensdown needed capable, tough and portable computing platform, so the coop approached Lenovo in search of devices that could handle the realities of farm life.
Ravensdown selected the ThinkPad X1 Carbon loaded with Windows 10 Pro. The PC sports a four layer carbon-fibre reinforced chassis and a magnesium alloy roll-cage.
Ravensdown reported annual revenue of $749.6 million for the year ended 31 May 2020, flat year on year. A net loss of $2.1 million after the cooperative issued $29.8 million in bonus shares was down from a profit of $11.6 million in 2019.
In February, Overseer was upgraded with the addition of a farm impact report and a scenario tool, functions which are designed to make farm planning easier and more effective and to support farmers and growers develop and monitor their farm environment plans.
The report included physical aspects of the farm including management as well as the nutrient budget, making it easier to establish the amount of nitrogen fertiliser to be applied to a pastoral area to meet the 2020 National Environmental Standard.
