What colour is a farmer’s collar?

Historically, the distinction between blue-collar and white-collar work was the difference between manual labour versus clerical work; between getting your boots dirty and working in an office.

Farming was traditionally seen as blue-collar work – but as any farmer will tell you, there’s always been plenty of white-collar work to do. In fact, the volume of paperwork and reporting required seems to grow every year.

Whether it’s securing finance, budgeting, quality assurance, compliance and industry accreditation (LPA, MSA, EUCAS, NFAS, MyBMP, Freshcare, EU ISCC, GAF to name a few), biosecurity, sustainability, calculating disease or pest risk, figuring out when to sow, harvest, buy or sell, good data is absolutely key.

It’s definitely time to ditch the pencil and paper and take control of your information management, so the data you collect to make the best possible ‘blue-collar’ operational decisions can be easily used for the ‘white-collar’ compliance and reporting tasks and double data entry is eliminated.

If you’re like me, there’s a million things you’d rather do than more office work!

In the same way that machinery took much of the back breaking work out of farming, agricultural technology (agtech) is a game changer. It replaces many previously manual tasks and helps you stay on top of the ever-expanding amount of office work involved in running a successful operation.

Pairtree is a leading proponent of ‘business as usual’ data collection on farms, where your agtech either automatically collects data, or you and your workers enter it on an app during daily activities.

Getting into the habit of entering data into your management apps when you finish moving the cattle or when you turn off the spray rig in the shed is key to laying a solid digital foundation that will soon make your life so much easier.

Recording all the information digitally means you can combine different data sets for data-backed operational decision-making and reporting and — perhaps equally importantly — maintain your market access and compliance now and into the future.

Agtech is a game changer for both ‘blue-collar’ and ‘white-collar’ work

Agtech grants programs, like the NSW DPI’s Farms of the Future and Federal On Farm Connectivity Program, help farmers decide on the right agtech to buy by identifying ‘pain points’: physically demanding, time consuming and/or critical operational tasks where agtech can save time, money or labour and also deliver better results.

A remote soil probe not only gives you a real-time insight into soil moisture at various depths, it also lets you know how much moisture there is now compared to last month or last year, because all of the data is automatically recorded back in the office.

It takes some of the guesswork out of sowing & pasture planning, irrigation and drought mitigation and also saves labour because you don’t have to drive around inserting probes and recording the numbers. It’s a win-win. The same goes for GPS tags, in paddock livestock weighing, digital weather stations, tank sensors and plenty of other agtech.

Work smarter, not harder by collecting all the data that’s right for you

By collaborating with 100+ leading agtech suppliers, Pairtree simplifies the task of collecting data from multiple sources and securely stores it in a standard format, so you can easily retrieve it and use it in different ways.

We are proud to promote #collaborativeagriculture – where agtech suppliers collaborate, rather than compete, so farmers can choose a suite of agtech solutions from different suppliers that best suits their unique operation, then allow companies like Pairtree to integrate that data so it can be shared between ‘blue-collar’ solutions and ‘white-collar’ reporting more easily.

No matter what colour collar you prefer to wear on your farm, adopting agtech is guaranteed to pay long-term dividends and help you stay ahead of the game, so what are you waiting for?