🇬🇧 Webinar: Better Winter Grazing Using Software

[Annabel Rodgers]

Welcome, everybody to our webinar on innovative livestock practices. My name is Annabelle Rogers. I’m here with my colleague Josh Brock and we have fantastic presenters tonight. We’ve got Seth Wareing, James Daniel, Phil White and Dewi Jones, and so it’s a great evening and we’ve got a lot in store. We’re discussing various management practices that hopefully will be useful to yourselves on the farm to complement your own businesses. I’m definitely hoping for a really good discussion tonight and we’ve got plenty of people to make that happen. First, we will go ahead with a bit of housekeeping. We really encourage a lot of questions from anyone and everyone. We have the Q&A button down in the bottom right hand side on the panel there. Please put questions in there. That will ensure they’re not missed and we’ll do our best to get to all of them. Then we’ll have all the presenters go in each of their slots and we’ll let them present and then at the end of each session there will be a Q&A. Keep the questions coming, and we’ll save them up for the end of each session.

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For those of you who don’t know who we are, AgriWebb is a farm management platform, used for farm record keeping and trying to simplify making those data-driven decisions. We love putting on these events; there’s so much to learn. Pre-2020 this might have been with a beer in hand somewhere on the farm, but, I guess what 2020 has taught us is that we can do a lot of information sharing virtually and really get a lot out of it. I hope that’s the case tonight. We love implementing and sharing all the innovative practices that can happen on the farm. If AgriWebb is of interest to you, give it a go. We’ve got a 14 day trial. You’ll hear from 2 customers tonight, but maybe it might be a good time just to just give that a go and see how that is gonna benefit your farm.

I’ll hand over to my colleague Josh, who will introduce our fantastic speakers a bit more and get the show on the road.

[Josh Brock]
Thanks very much. We have fantastic sessions which I’ll post. First, with James Daniel from Precision Grazing and Phil White, who is, you know, a customer of Precision Grazing as well as AgriWebb and he’s implemented AgriWebb to monitor how are things going on the farm. I guess we’ll let them take that away. Then the second session is Dewi Jones at Innovis, looking at Winter Ewe Management. Then finally with Seth Wareing from Stabiliser Cattle Company, looking at sustainable profitable cycle production.

Please like Annabel said, please get as many questions in as possible. We want to be as interactive and as fun as possible. I guess what we’ll do is we’ll pass on to James, Daniel and Phil, right? The rest of us will kill our cameras and mute our microphones. Then we’ll save up the questions until the end because that’s where we’ve got a good bit of time.

[James Daniel]
Evening all. Thanks everyone for joining us and it’s a real pleasure to look down and see so many names I recognise from Cornwall, through Scotland and then through Wales. I hope everyone is doing well. It’s pretty cold here tonight in Southfield. We’ll keep you warm in a safe and virtual way.

[Phil White]
Thanks James. Thanks for having me on.

[James Daniel]
I’m James Daniel with Precision Grazing. We’re a farm servicing business. We specialize in pasture based productions, so that’s doing more and getting more from grass. We’re working with chiefly beef and dairy farms across the UK. We’re very fortunate to have Phil as one of our clients and also in the discussion as one of our members. Phil, tell us about yourself and about the farm.

[Phil White]
Hi everyone, I’m Phil White and we farm down in South Oxfordshire. The farm is about 250 hectares of mixed farm: arable, beef, poultry and a bit of other stuff going on on the side. Yeah, never a dull moment. We’re really enjoying two things that we’ve done in the last couple of years. One is to sign up with James to get our grazing management sorted out and also we were an early adopter with AgriWebb. We’re not as far into it as I know we need to be, but it’s just been a real godsend to have all the record keeping in one place with some really useful management information at our fingertips. So yeah, thanks very much for having me on.

[James Daniel]
So here is the plan for the next 30 to 40 minutes or so: I’ve got some slides. They’re mainly pictures, and we’re gonna talk through those with you. There’s an agenda to discuss, but in principle we’re going to look at a bit of an overview of your farm this year, just a recap of how the season has been, and then we’re gonna head on to look specifically in terms of how we are set up for this winter to make sure we are really successful Start to the spring of 2020.

So, I’ll share my screen with you guys. For those who maybe haven’t come across Precision Grazing before, we’re focused on three areas. One is our discussion groups. We run four of those in England with some great assistance from Liz Jennifer. So if you’re not in a discussion group, they’re really wonderful place to be; meeting local people and I can tell you from first hand experience and working with our clients that if you’re making changes on the farm, it’s not always your neighbours you would go to for support. There’s lots of local farms on social media that you can share your vision with. So we put together our discussion groups to help link those farms up and they’re proving really successful so far. In Wales we offer the same thing where we do that through Farming Connect and through the Prosper from Pasture program and that’s open for applications. So if you’re based in Wales, there is support available and some great groups to get into.

Discussion Groups is one, and individual farm consultancies is another. In the new year we’re putting together some online courses. Check out the Precision Grazing website. So I think that gives us an overview and lots of ways to get in touch.

[End of Partial Transcript]

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