Pasture

We are excited to introduce the Pasture app, our new pasture measurement tool that works on your smartphone. All you must do is open the app and tap the measuring button (camera icon) for the app to measure your pasture. It works like a Rising Plate Meter (RPM) but is just much easier and quicker.

The Pasture app by Gaze AI uses smart technology to ‘read’ your pasture and determine what the mass of dry matter is on your pasture (kgDM/hA).

Instructions for use:

1) Open the Pasture app and adjust the settings (gear icon) for season and pasture to suit your farm, if necessary.

2) Hold your phone perpendicular to the ground at waist height above the pasture you want to measure.

(Tips - Ensure that any big shadow areas are excluded in the picture. It's fine to measure in full shade or under cloud. You can measure in a landscape position.)

3) Tap the measuring button (camera icon) and read the results from the screen.

4) The Pasture app asks you to tell it which paddock/camp you are measuring.

5 ) A results image with the results printed on a picture of the area measured will be saved into your phone’s images folder by default.

Like an RPM you want to take a representative sample of readings of your paddock/camp and then average them out before multiplying it with the surface area of the paddock/camp. We suggest at least 5 measurements in a 'X' pattern or 9 measurements in a 'W' pattern distributed evenly across the paddock/camp.

Disclaimer - Our app is accurate for practical purposes (It is most accurate between 1500kgDM/ha and 3000kgDM/ha), but overstates short grass a bit and understates long grass a bit. While our app is forgiving as to exactly which height you take the reading at, it performs the best around 70-90cm high (which is hip height for most of us).

It soon will be available on Apple iPhone and we are working on several new features that will further enhance the Pasture app’s capabilities.

There are a few things to keep in mind when you compare the Pasture app to an RPM:

1) The Pasture app measures an area about 8 times bigger than an RPM, which means that to have plonk (measure) the area (the image) being compared with the RPM around 6-8 times and then average out the results to compare with the Pasture app results.

2) If you are comparing the Pasture app measurements with each other then you need to be careful how you do this. The Pasture app is pretty accurate and since you are probably hand holding your phone one measurement may actually include bits on the ends of the area that was not included in a previous measurement. This will influence things because The Pasture app reads down to centimetre levels. If you, for instance, accidentally include a strip of 25cm along the one side of the area measurement being compared, you effectively include around ¼ of a square meter on the one side, and because you shifted the phone to do this, you are excluding ¼ of a square meter on the other side of the area, which equate to around ½ square meter of different pasture being measured. Ideally you should potentially use a tripod or something very stable to steady your phone if you want to compare measurements by the Pasture app.