HOURS BACKHours back
Running it from off-farm
An off-farm job, a second property, a family weekend, six months away. The grazing still has to happen on the day it is due.
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Most cattle operations are not run by someone who is on the place all day. There is an off-farm job. A second block an hour up the road. A manager covering three properties. A family that would like to see you at a weekend.
The grazing does not care. The rest period closes on the day it closes, and the mob has to be on the next break whether anyone can get out there or not. So the shift happens late, and late shifts compound across a season.
The move happens on the day you set, not the day you are free.
Draw the breaks for the week ahead, schedule them, and let Gallagher eShepherd™ run them. The cattle walk forward into the new allocation while you are somewhere else. If the season turns, open the app and redraw.
The work that used to mean being in the
Dion Kilmister farms beef in the Wairarapa. When he and his wife Ali had to spend six months in Australia for medical treatment, the system got tested harder than any trial would have managed.
In his words, they managed their entire grazing operation remotely from the Gold Coast, shifting virtual fences and making feed decisions daily on live weight data. Not a holding pattern while they were away. The same grazing management they would have run standing in the paddock, run from another country.
Shorter absences work the same way.
In South Canterbury, Nigel and Gina Gardner tested it on a long weekend. Nigel programmed the breaks before they left and activated the moves himself from the holiday location rather than asking the farm manager. He checked afterwards, and the mobs had moved onto the new breaks with no issues at all.
In Alberta, Nick Kunec pre-scheduled eight or nine moves before a trip to Manitoba and Vancouver. It was like I never left.
The same tool buys back an ordinary week, not just a big trip.
Mathew and Gemma Barham run eight mobs of bulls across 1,020 hectares of steep Hawkes Bay hill country and schedule every break to update at 6am, so the mobs are on new feed by 7am while the team is still in the kitchen. On a Taranaki river flat, George Hardwick-Smith plans ten mobs across 120 cells each and puts about 40 minutes a week into it. He has drawn the week's shifts sitting in Wanaka.
Be clear about what still needs a person on the ground.
Water has to be checked, and a trough that fails is still a trough that fails. Cattle need eyes on them, and an alert tells you where to look, not what you will find when you get there. The base station needs power and a place to sit.
Leslie Hunewill puts it plainly: this was never meant to replace a rider. You still ride the country, check the feed and look after the cattle. What goes away is the driving, the tape, and the trip that existed only to open a gate.
Be somewhere else.
The rotation still runs.