LIC’s new software functionality to make life easier for farmers

LIC has launched additional functionality into its MINDA® software, enabling collaboration with more industry partners to ease farmers’ compliance burden and save them time.

The new data sharing capabilities will give farmers the ability to transfer animal information directly from their MINDA account to other industry applications. 

LIC Chief Information Officer, Dhaya Sivakumar says these upgrades will deliver significant time savings to farmers.

“The need for high quality farm data keeps growing, but this is often met with frustration from farmers when they’re required to supply the same information to multiple industry players,” says Sivakumar. 

A recent DairyNZ survey found New Zealand farmers spend approximately one hour every day on administrative tasks like paperwork and reporting. 

“By leveraging data sharing appropriately, we can quickly ease the compliance burden for farmers so they can meet their reporting requirements faster and spend more time on-farm.” 

Sivakumar says MINDA, which is used by more than 90 per cent of dairy farmers in New Zealand, provides a perfect base for data sharing. 

“MINDA gives farmers a safe data-sharing platform, letting them decide how their information is managed and shared. 

“We have big plans for how we can make our farmer shareholders’ data work harder for them. Now that we’ve laid the foundations, we’re excited to partner with more companies to turn that vision into a reality.”  

Fonterra farmers will soon have the option to prefill their Farm Dairy Records with animal information from MINDA, while farmers who supply Open Country will be able to do the same in their Farm Environmental Plan – reducing the need to manually enter this information.  

Meanwhile, the collaboration with OSPRI brings Animal Status Declarations (ASD) into MINDA, so farmers can complete the admin required for animal movements all in one place.  

LIC MINDA Business Manager Blair Smith says these integrations are an exciting next step for MINDA, following the success of its integration with cow wearables partners. 

“We’re now partnered with eight leading wearables providers and have 400,000 cows in MINDA that are connected to their wearables through that integration. Those farmers no longer have to wade through data from two apps, instead they are getting a clear picture of their animals’ performance, health and fertility wherever they need it most.”

Looking ahead, farmers will soon be able to populate stock movements and reconciliations in New Zealand farm reporting software, Trev, direct from MINDA. 

Trev Chief Growth Officer Brenna Townshend says they’re excited to partner with LIC to help make farmers’ lives simpler with less friction. 

“Farmers are facing a massive challenge to collect, store and validate data to meet the requirements of downstream stakeholders. We’re excited to work with LIC who share our motivation to help alleviate the data burden placed on farmers. By connecting the dots across datasets we’re able to provide our mutual customers with the right tools to win back time.”

Smith says LIC is also in discussions with other farm management and accounting software providers, as well as other milk processors.

“We have an open-door policy when it comes to who we partner with to make farmers lives easier and we’re pleased to see this collaborative attitude reflected in the industry partners we’re working with too. 

“By continuing to break down data silos and getting different systems to speak the same digital language, we can help farmers reclaim valuable time and also improve the accuracy of data used in the dairy sector,” says Smith.

Farmers are able to access and manage these integrations through a brand-new partners page in MINDA.

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