Boonderoo Pastoral: Adopting tech on-farm

Integrating Farming Technology at Boonderoo

Third generation farmer Lachlan Seears runs Boonderoo Pastoral, a mixed operation running 1,000+ cattle and 5,000+ sheep, as well as wheat, barley, and broad beans. Driving production efficiency forward is Lachie’s chief aim, which is why he adopts technology on both the cropping and livestock sides of his business.

The Boonderoo Pastoral team consists of Lachie’s wife and parents, two permanent staff, and “casuals throughout the year at peak seasons,” so there are a lot of moving parts for this incredibly innovative farmer to manage. Despite ensuring hired on staff are tech savvy, at the least familiar with smartphones and their apps, he still needs to keep things simple and accessible. After trialing “a few different software packages over the years,” Lachie was “really impressed with how simple AgriWebb is to set up and use.”

“Running such a complex operation, it’s possible to miss the optimal window for vaccinating lambs, spraying crops, or harvesting,” explained Lachie. “This platform allows me to remember when things must be done, and that makes our business run a lot better.” With AgriWebb, the team at Boonderoo “saw direct cost-saving benefits with chemical application and harvesting efficiencies.”

AgriWebb also helps Lachie plan for the future, by looking at the past. “Seeing where a mob has come from and moved to – that’s so much powerful information,” he explained. “It allows us to really dissect our business, to see which paddocks are performing and which aren’t.”

Lachie couldn’t imagine going back to a time before “click and drag” mob movement tracking. Take away his AgriWebb mob movements, and he “would be devastated. It’d kill me,” he joked.

When Audits are a Breeze

At Boonderoo, adopting AgriWebb has taken the guesswork out of recordkeeping. Having “everyone on a cloud-based system” makes information transfer easy; the entire Boonderoo team is on the same page because it’s easier to both record and access information.

The first year that JBS audited Boonderoo for the Farm Assurance program, Lachie “was still manually inputting information, and then providing that information to them for the audit.” Audit day is now a simple matter of “handing the auditor my iPad with AgriWebb all opened up.”

The accuracy of records is incredibly valuable to Lachie, as it not only enhances farm efficiency on a day to day basis, and makes annual reporting easy, but also supports his goal of passing his farm on to his children some day.

Life after AgriWebb

In planning for the future, Lachie understands the importance of a solid plan that reinforces his goals and objectives, but he also knows he must remain flexible. That is why Boonderoo Pastoral has “Plan A, B, C, D, and E.”

To know how to proceed, both under his management, and for future generations, Lachie thinks it is “vitally important to know where we’ve come from. AgriWebb allows us to collate so much information that will be beneficial 20 years down the track.”

That fourth generation will be able to see exactly “how we used to graze our animals, what sort of recordkeeping we used to do, and what sort of animal treatments we used to do.” Lachie called the AgriWebb platform “crucial to seeing this farming business grow, and being able to pass it to the next generation.”

Strengthen your farm’s operations, and build its future. Try AgriWebb for free today, and see how simple this farm management software is to get started.