Taranaki's grass-roots innovator

BY RICHARD WOODD

That thing on little wheels you see some dairy farmers towing behind a quad, somewhat aimlessly around the paddock, was designed and developed by a Hawera dairy farmer, Hayden Lawrence.

Its humble appearance conceals some very sophisticated technology. It's a pasture meter, in which laser beams read the grass height 200 times every second and it's linked to a GPS device that plots where the measurements are made in the paddock.

The information can be downloaded into a computer on to an aerial photo of the farm, and the user can see how many hours of grazing he has in any paddock.

Mr Lawrence designed and built his rapid pasture meter as a thesis for the honours section to his Bachelor of Applied Science and Agriculture Engineering at Massey University.

He and the university sold the manufacturing rights to C-Dax Ltd of Palmerston North and it's now their star performer, the C-Dax Pasture Meter. About 700 have been sold in this country and 100 to other countries.

C-Dax calls it "a revolutionary product proving indispensable to strategic farming operations. Effectively increase your payout by 4.6c for every 1 per cent increase in grass utilisation". Up to the time the pasture meter was launched at the 2006 National Fieldays, the only other device available for pasture measurement was the falling (or rising) plate meter, which requires a walk diagonally across each paddock.

The C-Dax Pasture meter measures while the bike is being driven at 20kmh and it doesn't matter who is driving - the result will be the same.

Mr Lawrence, the department of precision agriculture and the university itself, collectively own the international patent rights and share the royalties paid as part of the retail sale price (which ranges between $4500 and $5500, depending on the model).

He's a very interesting guy who is driven to set and achieve goals that would daunt most people.

He lives at the top end of Fraser Rd, on the high plateau between Hawera and Eltham, with his wife Alecia who, in addition to being his business partner, is an emergency department nurse at Hawera Hospital. She is fully involved in farm policy-making and her husband's brainstorming.

Since June last year they have been 25 per cent equity partners in the dairy farm of Mr Lawrence's parents, Ray and Joyce.

Before that Mr Lawrence was a fulltime university student for seven years, during which time he completed his B.Appl. Sc (Hons). He then went on to do a PhD in precision agriculture.

So now, we could call him Dr Lawrence.

"When I left Stratford High School, I found what I really wanted to do at Massey. I'd always had a passion for farming, and being raised on this farm, had opportunities to learn and play around with things. I loved the technical side that mum and dad brought to farming.

"The plate meter had been around for a long time but the proportion of users was small because it's a lot of walking, a lot of work.

"New Zealand agriculture went through a 'she'll be right' phase and people with experience were making decisions that they were confident about but they couldn't explain why or how they were making those decisions. And that's really why we started on this.

"I struggled with watching dad making those pasture grazing decisions based on his visual assessment and I was always asking why. You could not put it down on paper; he was comfortable with it based on his own knowledge and experience.

"Our farm milking platform is 85 hectares in 50 paddocks. It used to take three to four hours to measure with the plate meter.

"The C-Dax will do it in 1 1/2 hours. You just go from corner to corner, the same as with a plate meter. The only limitation is where you can take an ATV.

"With bigger farms and staff employed, anyone can use this and get exactly the same results, whereas with the plate meter you can get great variations between users."

C-Dax specialises in ATV applications. When Hayden called the production manager in 2003 for a meeting, "they didn't need any convincing. The towed meter was completely new to them".

"It's become their star product because it's so innovative and different and can be readily utilised."

He worked alongside the C-Dax developers for three years and when he finished his PhD he was employed as the company's innovations manager. Now he's their technical consultant and can usually be found on the C-Dax stand at the Fieldays.

He says the biggest learning curve he's ever experienced was the commercialisation of a new product.

"It's a huge undertaking for a company, a huge amount of cost involved. We had to calculate the proportion of farmers who would buy the meter and how much advantage they would get, to set the price target. We had to determine how much this was worth to New Zealand and the world. It took three years to get it on the market. We were probably $800 over the target price indication we had, but that was the cheapest it could be built for. Now, with greater volume of sales, the price has come down.

"When I decided to leave C-Dax and go farming, it wasn't because I didn't like the work, but I realised I was becoming a consultant to farmers who were getting the satisfaction of buying and using the products and I'd never actually done it myself.

"Now my passion is setting the farm up to achieve high production with good systems management; so good that it doesn't matter who you take in or out of the system, it will still happen. The whole systems management thing is really important to me and Alecia."

Ray and Joyce Lawrence were producing  105,000kg off the 85ha.

Under a sharemilking regime it dropped to 78,000 over five years.

Hayden and Alecia's target is 103,000 this year from 210 cows. They are Friesians averaging 550kg liveweight. They are brought into a temporarily converted implement shed for calving. Alecia rears the calves.

"We did 468kg/ms per cow last year, from a herd of 210, which is a fairly low stocking rate, which we are addressing," says Mr Lawrence. "The target production is 490 per cow this year, and 600 per cow five years out from our 2008 base year.

"The aim is to produce 130,000kg off 85ha. We've done the calculations and we believe we have the genetics to do it. We can't do it on grass alone so we have employed a nutritionist to work out a grass plus grain system."

The plan is to tune the farm to a level where the couple can still run it but spend much more time off farm, so having good staff is the key to it all. Their main man currently is Gaston Felix Riviero, an experienced herd manager from Uruguay.

The Lawrences were only married in February after six years together, mostly in Palmerston North, and have yet to start a family.

"We were thrown in the deep end in spring, and had to sink or swim," says Mr Lawrence. "We rebuilt the milking shed and the cows started calving before it was finished; it was stressful. In hindsight it was probably very good marriage preparation counselling."

His longer term goal is to be the head of a major agricultural business, "where I can develop things that will improve New Zealand agriculture.

"I find opportunities confront me every day and sometimes you have to say no.

"I learned this when I first went farming: if you're going to try new things, don't give up if they don't work the first time.

"Bill Franklin, the then C-Dax chief executive, once told me: 'A good manager will eventually make himself redundant.'

"I guess that's what I'm trying to do here at Fraser Rd, when the systems are such that they don't need me. That then opens up new opportunities."

- © Fairfax NZ News