3 Handy Mobile Apps to Manage your Pastures

Published 16th September 2020
Pasture and Soil

Whether your animals graze all year round or only part of the year, you know that managing your grasslands is essential. We published an article about the benefits of rotational grazing a few weeks ago, today we are sharing with you three pasture management apps that might help you with your grazing decisions!

FarmGRAZE

This app is designed to measure the grass/forage available in your different paddocks while estimating the grazing needs for livestock (sheep, beef cattle, dairy cattle) based on sward height or kgDM/ha. Then, the app produces recommendations in a traffic-light graphic indicating whether a field is producing the optimal yield for stock or too much or too little grass.

Our review: this is a user-friendly app, easy to set up and use. This app may not be suitable for some grazing systems. 

Availability: Apple and Android devices, including a free (lite) or full (paid) version costing about USD $10 (one-off payment). Overall, the app remains quite basic, but it’s the cheapest option here.

FarmGRAZE

 

PastureMap

This app uses satellite imagery of your farm, then you can draw pastures or add infrastructures such as hay shed, water trough, or gates. You can also subdivide your pastures, which is especially useful for farmers who practice back fencing. You can visualise the exact location of your herds/mobs and record your moves. 

Our review: the pasture record keeping is a great feature of this app and it’s quite easy to visualise the movements of the herd and organise the planned and actual grazing days. Overall, the app remains quite basic if not used alongside the web version, but it can be handy for your new staff to find paddocks, gates or water valve on their phones! This app can be used by lifestyle blocks or very small farms as well.
 
Availability: Apple and Android devices. The app is free, the web/desktop cost about USD $45/month for the basic subscription.
 

MaiaGrazing

The mobile app is intended to enable simple and quick in-field data capture. The full web version uses this data for detailed paddock and stock analytics, feed budgeting, stock-flow (gross margin) reporting, grazing charts and grazing plans.

Our review: MaiaGrazing is quite similar to PastureMap app, but is more production/data orientated while PastureMap is a good team tool. MaiaGrazing web design is smart and looks nice.

Availability: Apple and Android devices. The app is free but works only with an existing MaiaGrazing account. The web/desktop app has a restricted “lite” version and an unlimited pro version which can cost anywhere from $40 to $150/month (USD) depending on your tier.

 

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