Geoff Bates, managing director of Pastoral Robotics, gave a presentation at the Callaghan Innovation Seminar held at Fieldays 2019. He highlights the problem of nitrate leaching in New Zealand waters. He also presents a solution that not only stops water pollution in dairy farms, but also significantly increases the grass growth, benefiting both the environment and farmers.

Lysimeters are tubes of undisturbed earth that allow us to capture and measure all the leachate from a treated grass / urine sample. Trials of our latest NitroStop formulation gave us a leaching reduction of 74% - an undisputable breakthrough in the battle to clean our rivers, lakes and aquifers.
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Next we will be repeating these trials to our new (larger) 50cm diameter lysimeter facility (see photo) for autumn trials in April 2019.

Pastoral Robotics featured on Rural Delivery on Saturday the 7th of April 2018. To see the show on line goto: https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/rural-delivery/episodes/s2018-e3
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Pastoral Robotics announces lab results indicating DCD equivalence for our new nitrification inhibitor, NitroStop™. Testing of key components of the NitroStop™ urine patch treatment mix in rhizosphere (root zone) and lysimeter trials achieved the same level of nitrification inhibition as achieved with DCD.  A major breakthrough in the dairy industry’s battle to clean up our water.
 
When NitroStop™ is applied through their innovative urine patch detection and treatment machine, Spikey®, it becomes a much needed practical solution to nitrate leaching which, at the same time, increases pasture growth and improves farm productivity.
 
The withdrawal of the nitrification inhibitor DCD, due to residual detection in milk, left a hole in the dairy industry's available tools to fight nitrate leaching, possibly the biggest environmental challenge facing the dairy industry in New Zealand. Pastoral Robotics Limited is now able to fill that hole - using the revolutionary Spikey® machine and NitroStop™.
 
The key ingredients of NitroStop™ are already used in agriculture for other applications and are not expected to have any residual issues.
 
According to Geoff Bates, managing director of Pastoral Robotics Limited, the next step is to undertake much larger lysimeter trials to amass a body of evidence as to the effectiveness of the treatment which can be used to convince regional councils of the performance of this new solution to a problem of national concern.