Pasture Vibe is a growth forecasting tool developed for New Zealand farmers, which uses the latest NIWA weather data available to generate a 90-day growth projection for your farm.
Although available for purchase independently, Pasture Vibe is now bundled for free with all FARMAX Advantage and DSM subscriptions. This allows FARMAX users to improve the accuracy of their FARMAX models by incorporating the last growth rate data available.
Getting started
To get started with PastureVibe, first you will need to ensure you have a longitude/latitude entered for your farm via the Whole Farm Level Properties Screen in FARMAX.
In most cases you will have already entered this information when your farm was first created, however this may not always be the case of long-time subscribers.
Ensure you have a longitude/latitude entered for your farm via the Whole Farm Level Properties screen.
Please note, there will be a one or two day delay between entering your location in FARMAX and PastureVibe being made available.
Once the FARMAX team have setup PastureVibe for you behind the scenes, you should see new options in your farm Properties screen to enable PastureVibe.
To activate the PastureVibe integration:
Tick ‘Active’ in the PastureVibe section of your farm Properties screen.
Image 1: PastureVibe settings at the Properties screen at whole-farm level
To view your growth forecasts for the next 90 days, navigate to the Pasture screen at the whole-farm level, where you should see a light-green Vibe growth rate.
To apply the growth rates manually, click on the monthly growth rate buttons in the Vibe row.
Alternatively, new growth rate forecasts can be applied automatically by ticking the ‘Apply Growth Automatically’ option in the PastureVibe section of your farm Properties screen.
Accessing the PastureVibe website
To view more detailed growth rate forecasts for your farm, or to update your farm’s Plant Available Water settings, you can now access the new PastureVibe website using your PureFarming account (click here to learn more).
Once you have your PureFarming account setup via FARMAX, log in to PastureVibe via this link: https://pasturevibe.co.nz/
Learning
As of May 2024, PastureVibe now “learns” about your farm’s growth from your historic FARMAX data.
PastureVibe now considers the pasture growth history of your farm, as tracked in FARMAX each time you enter a pasture cover measurement, as well as the latest data from NIWA about weather in your location, to provide growth forecasts for the next 90-days.
For some farms, particularly those with a long history of recording pasture covers in FARMAX, this has significantly improved growth forecasts.
These growth rate forecasts will only improve over time as you enter more and more pasture cover measurements into FARMAX.
At the time this update was released, one FARMAX customer had recorded almost 400 pasture cover measurements over the past 12 years, all of which was used to inform PastureVibe’s growth forecasts!
