Our Farming for Change Conference in late February has got a lot of farmers and farmer support people
thinking about the real future of the industry.

To me there is now a very clearly determined direction. This direction is the result, it seems to me, of three very different pathways of research, development and innovation that have now started to converge. The outcome is a clear approach to farming that is both environmentally sustainable and delivers increased profits.

The first pathway that has led to this is what I call the biological approach. This has been adopted by a number of New Zealand farmers over the past few years and focuses on the health of the soil, followed by pasture health and then consequently animal health. There are some good examples around NZ of the production responses that can be gained from this approach.

The second pathway, explored successfully in Australia, is the significant production responses that are available by improving the carbon content of the soil. This a spectacular story and has produced some real opportunities for positive impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, waterway quality and carbon levels. Applied here on pastoral farms, it could provide them with at least a carbon-neutral status in a foreseeable timeframe.

Complementary to, and critical to, these two pathways is the third - the measurement and management of profit. This is a critical development as it allows the effectiveness, efficiency and profit-generating abilities of these new approaches to be evaluated properly. You see, it is absolutely great to have all this environmentally sustainable, green 'technology' but it is also important to actually know how profitable it is from a farmer's point of view, ie. what the bottom-line impacts will be.

And it is this third pathway that eCOGENT.biz has focused on, utilising extensive R&D, proprietary e-technology and best business practices to develop a daily profit approach that allows more precise decision making and management.

In the process we discovered that significant factors of daily profit are greatly influenced by dynamics such as stocking rates and pasture residuals. It is only when these are at optimum levels that fertiliser practices can be fine tuned. There is absolutely no point in putting on the best guess fertiliser, or witches brew or whatever, unless the profit measuring tools are in place.

Over the past 12 months, farmers that are measuring profit and have correctly addressed stocking rates and pasture residuals have achieved profit improvements within a month of biology based fertiliser application. Note that this is profit growth, not just pasture growth, and they have not been able to achieve that sort of result by putting on chemical nitrogen.

This is all very exciting for the future of farming, and so I am delighted that these three approaches are coming together at the Farming for Change Conference in Christchurch on both the 26 February, when we will hear from some world-class speakers, and also on the 27 February, when we will visit farms that are putting these approaches into practice.