IN THIS NEWSLETTER 

• WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING – General News & an update on RavahTech & Nutrisens
• INTRODUCE US TO YOUR CONSULTANT – We have some products soon to be released that they would be interested in
• NEW FEATURES in agCOMMANDER  –  Features added to agCommander in the year to date
  • Cropping Features
  • Livestock Features
  • Asset Manager Pro Features
  • Inventory Features
  • Laboratory Tests Features
  • Mapping Features
  • John Deere Integration
• SHARING agCOMMANDER MAPS WITH OTHERS  

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING

With our merger with RavahTech Inc. last October, life here at agCommander has become a whirlwind. In June we appointed Philip Garrison as our Business Development Manager. Philip is based in New York State, USA. He was born in Brazil, grew up in Argentina and married a girl in the US. He speaks Portuguese, Spanish and perfect English. Philip is working mainly in North and South America, but with his languages, he has been a great asset for us, helping us to communicate with our Spanish based team and to deal with clients and prospects in Spain, South and Central America.

In recent times agCommander has been taken up by a number of vineyard and orchard operations in Spain. Clients may have noticed the new Area Unit of Measure in agCommander, Dunams. That is used in Israel and we welcome our new Israeli client, Zemach, a large agricultural consulting company based near the Sea of Galilee. At their request and with their help, we will soon be translating agCommander to Hebrew. We have also taken on board a client based in Sweden with farming operations in the Dominican Republic and other parts of the world.

We welcome all our new clients who have joined us in 2023. It’s nice to hear from the new clients who have moved over from other systems that we are doing a good job here!

We appreciate the feedback. Good and bad.

Most of the time this year has been spent working on integration with the various parts of the Nutrisens System. To date we’ve put in over 2000 hours on development work. That work is ongoing and we anticipate the entire system will be ready for release in October-November. The work we are doing involves integration with:

• very sophisticated satellite imagery with indices that relate to plant stress, leaf area, trends in plant vigor etc.
• “intelligent” weather forecasting systems where we feed weather records from the on-farm weather station to the weather forecasting system so it can use machine learning to refine its forecasting ability for your location, learning from your historical data;
• irrigation scheduling using the vapor pressure deficit data from the on-farm weather station plus the “intelligent” weather forecasting system and trends in plant moisture uptake and average root zone soil moisture,
• fertilizer recommendations,
• specialized crop scouting on the mobile app
• and more…

There is so much going on it is hard to keep track of it all.

The agCommander team is very excited about what this technology will do for our clients in the future.

https://www.agcommander.com/introduction-to-nutrisens/

INTRODUCE US TO YOUR CONSULTANT 

The Nutrisens system is backed by a decade of research and development.

It is very sophisticated and when used well can result in quite substantial reductions in fertilizer costs … up to 60% reductions have been recorded. But there are other benefits that are more subtle but potentially even greater than those savings. In fruit crops, wine grapes and sugarcane, the ability to fine tune the application of fertilizers and to monitor what effect that is having on the plants in real time 24/7 has resulted in improvements like:

• Maximising Commercial Content of Sugar in sugar cane
• Controlling N & K in the root zone of the plants gives you improvements in fruit “health” that results in:
• Minimizing wastage
• Minimizing insect damage (insects tend not to attack healthy fruit)
• Maximising post harvest shelf life (fruit with an overload of N will rot more readily)
• For wine producers, having all the tools at your disposal to enable repeatability of the desired attributes of your fruit means the best possible wine year after year.

To make the most of the Nutrisens system it is important that agronomists are involved. So, the RavahTech marketing team is asking to be introduced to your agronomists.

As the official launch of the Nutrisens system approaches, we ask that any of you who are interested in the potential benefits of the system introduce us to your agronomists so we can bring them up to speed with the concepts

Emile Jordaan is from the Cape region of South Africa. He and I met in Cape Town in  July 1997 and for a few years he was our distributor in the Cape region. Emile is an agronomist with 25 years of experience and has extensive knowledge of soil moisture probes, irrigation scheduling and the like. He will be located in Tasmania for 3 months as of 2 weeks from now, so if you reach out to him by email and let him know your contact details, he will be in touch. Emile is familiar with Australia. He has been here several times and has many contacts here already.

We realize some of you have in-house agronomists and we have been in contact with many of you who are in that cohort.

There will be an array of levels of Nutrisens offerings. The most affordable and “basic” level offering will be known as N-WATCH 

N-WATCH consists of a logger and one Nutrisens sensor and cloud-based software that charts the Nitrate and Potassium data from the sensor. It comes with a simple mobile app for the installers to use during the on-boarding process. Its main purpose is to be a “Nitrate Policeman” … to be placed in the leaching zone below the root zone of the plants to monitor fertilizer leaching 24/7. You will be able to set alarm levels and receive SMS alerts when levels hit your alarm points. We see this system as potentially the most applicable in dryland or rainfed cropping situations.

The top level offering will be known as NutrisensPRO  which will include the full  agCommander program and all of the newly added features mentioned above.

The other levels of Nutrisens systems also have cloud and mobile software but not the full agCommander system.  All will come with charting of N, K, soil moisture, weather information, etc.

Please let your agronomist know that we are keen to engage with them and get them up to speed with the science.

NEW FEATURES in agCOMMANDER

There have been many minor and some very major enhancements to agCommander in the past seven months. All fixes and features are published in the program on the Information or About screen. The following is a list of the more substantial features added this year to date.

CROPPING MODULE FEATURES

CHEMICAL RATE CALCULATOR

We had a feature request for a calculator that would calculate the application rate of a chemical where the chemical you were using had a different active ingredient strength to the one recommended by your agronomist

IRRIGATION BY VALVE

Used for tree and vine crops only. The areas watered by an irrigation valve can be configured. A Valve-Area may consist of a sub-area or 1 area or many areas combined.

When you have enabled Irrigation by Valve, you will see a list of Valves, rather than Cropped Areas when recording an Irrigation event. The polygon relating to a Valve-Area can be drawn or imported and used to select valves for data entry.

For full details, search for the new Knowledge Base article: Irrigation by Valves

ROUND UP WATER RATE TO MAKE FULL TANK(S)

If you would like to ensure that your sprayer operator always empties the sprayer tank, there is a new feature that will round up the water rate per hectare to ensure your job does not involve parts of a tank full.

BUDGETING FOR TREE & VINE CROPS

We have added a special new feature to enable you to rapidly add Expected Yield and Expected Price information for each of your blocks. The option can be found on the “Budget” menu within the Budgets module.

LIVESTOCK MODULE FEATURES

LIVESTOCK BUDGETING

Of all the new features added to agCommander in the last 6 months, the Livestock Budgeting System wins first prize in terms of the amount of work involved. Since 2001, we have built a Livestock Budgeting System 4 times. Once for AACo that was used from 2001 to 2009. We then built another one for AACo in 2010. Around 2014-15 we were asked by a group of clients: Hassad, Dunkeld Pastoral and Minderoo, to build one into PAM. We gathered together all the requirements and spent a long time discussing how it would or should work. As it happened, the PAM Livestock Budget never made it into PAM, however we are pleased to say that all the great ideas that we gathered along the way have been incorporated into the new agCommander Livestock Budgeting Module. To understand how to use it, please read the Knowledge Base article. Just search for Livestock Budget

EXTRA LIVESTOCK REPORTS

We recently added 3 new Map Reports in the Livestock Module:

• Days Grazed,
• Days Spelled,
• Grazing Days / Hectare

Each of those reports covers 12 months up to any selected month-year.

PASTURE MONITORING REPORTS We have replicated all Pasture Monitoring reports in both the Cropping and Livestock Modules

STOCKED FIELDS MAP

This map report now shows a list of stock classes in the “Yards”.

ASSET MANAGER PRO MODULE FEATURES

As a result of some feature requests, we have recently added two new features to this module: Parts can now be associated with one or more Assets; meaning that when recording services and when viewing lists of parts, you can filter the lists by asset. We have also added a new part type called Filters, a Registration Number field for assets and a Vehicle Safety Inspection Date. There is also a new report that we’ve called the “Asset Status Report” which shows all assets and their last service date (and odometer reading if applicable) plus the next scheduled service information and the days or odometer units left to run before the next service.

INVENTORY MODULE FEATURES

When adding multiple new inventory purchases that are on the same invoice, you will now see a new “Repeat Last” button. Clicking on that button will repeat most of the items on the Inventory Purchases form to save time with data entry. Please note that the button will only appear once you have entered the first purchase for a session.

LABORATORY TEST MODULE

Generic Harvest Test Results and Water Test Results were added in January this year.

GEOLOCATED SOIL TESTS

If you import your soil test via the CSV importer in agCommander and if your soil test results are geo-located, you will be able to generate this style of map report…