Farm reporting software company Trev has recently acquired Cloud Farmer, which was a pioneer of farm recording in New Zealand and one of the first farm recording apps ever available.
Scott Townshend, Chief Executive of Trev told REX host Dominic George the red meat sector in particular was in dire need of a broader solution to on-farm recording and data analysis and sharing.
"The acquisition of Could Farmer allows us to accelerate that path where we take this known recording product in Cloud Farmer and bring that into the Trev engine to extract that information," he said.
"We reckon there is this real opportunity to align the best-of-breed solutions by joining these two established brands together in terms of quality recording and then value ad reporting on top of it," he said.
While he sees their acquisition of Cloud Farmer as a net positive for the farming industry, Townshend's focus is more on giving farmers the opportunity to choose what will work best for their needs, instead of monopolising the market.
"A good outcome for the industry is that there is a range of products that farmers can choose from in terms of what meets their farm business needs.
"Not one system to rule them all, we want farmers to have choice…at the end of the day it shouldn't be about having one system for dairy and one for red meat but rather these reporting systems that work for all farmers."
He explained that while the two products are currently under the same umbrella but operating as they have been, over time, Cloud Farmer will become a product within the Trev brand that utilises the strengths of each individual product together to provide users with useful data and insights from their farming records.
"Over time what we can start doing is bringing that data through and sucking it into the Trev data engine and start presenting back some of that information in really powerful insights for that decision-making purpose or benchmark reporting and that sort of thing."
While Cloud Farmer will eventually sit alongside Trev's pre-existing core products Townshend told George there won't be any change for pre-existing Cloud Farmer customers.
Trev started in 2018 with a focus on the dairy sector, but Townshend said they have expanded their product and won't favour meat or dairy farmers over one another.
For more information head to mytrev.com or check out their Facebook page.
Listen to the full chat between TREV CEO Scott Townshend and Dominic George above.
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