PASTORAL ROBOTICS
  • Home
  • Spikey®
  • NitroStop™
  • Fertiliser
  • About
  • News
  • Contact
  • Data Input

Major international recognition for Spikey

11/30/2019

0 Comments

 

Pastoral Robotics wins 2019 IMechE Energy Environment and Sustainability Group prize.

Picture
The Institute of Mechanical Engineering (IMechE)[1], one of the oldest and most internationally respected professional mechanical engineering bodies in the world, has just awarded Pastoral Robotics the Energy Environment and Sustainability Group prize.
​
This annual prize is to be awarded to a Mechanical Engineer who has taken significant steps to bridge the gap between an unsustainable present and a more sustainable future.
​
​Geoff Bates, managing director of Pastoral Robotics, says ‘The award is recognition of the impact that Pastoral Robotics Limited’s technology will have on the world’s environment, minimising nitrate leaching and greenhouse gas emissions from Pastoral Farming. It is great to see NZ innovation being recognised by such a prestigious professional body.

Picture
The award is hugely gratifying and an honour to be recognised internationally. Geoff will speak at the group’s annual meeting in December at 1 Birdcage Walk, London, a venue that is a bastion of engineering history.
​
Geoff sees the impact of farming on the environment as one of the most serious technical challenges of our time, one we have to solve in a manner that improves productivity and our standard of living without putting livelihoods at risk, ‘innovative new technology is the best, if not the only, way we can achieve this.’

[1] IMechE, based in London, was founded in 1847 and currently has 120,000 members in 140 different countries, see www.imeche.org/about-us

Picture
Geoff Bates with Spikey®
Pastoral Robotics’ technology - Spikey® applies NitroStop® to urine patches to grow more pasture by harvesting the urine nitrogen. The Spikey® technology has proven to grow more grass, reduce nitrogen discharge to the air and water whilst improving profitability. Spikey is a platform for targeted treatment of the main source of leaching - cow urine spots. The precision Spikey provides opens up a multitude of opportunities to specifically target nitrogen losses to the air and water, it is a paradigm shift in the way pastoral farming can be managed.
0 Comments

Denis Collins joins the team

10/7/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Pastoral Robotics Limited welcomes Denis Collins to our team. Denis will be focussing on selling Spikey® and ensuring customers get the maximum benefit from our revolutionary technology.
Spikey® is a machine that detects and treats urine to reduce Nitrogen losses - Spikey® has been running on farm for over two years and is ready for other farmers and the environment to reap the benefits. Ongoing research by independent bodies is showing significant reductions (30-70%) in leaching from our NitroStop® treatments.
Denis has joined our team to help customers get the most from keeping their nitrogen on farm. In Denis’s own words: “Spikey is the only practical solution he has seen to reduce nitrate leaching and grow more grass.”
Denis has the perfect background with an honours degree in Agricultural Science, and 3 year’s experience as a consulting officer with Dairy NZ, before a number of farming roles focussing on turning farms into profitable businesses.
Denis understands both farm systems and the regulatory nightmare. Having worked with Miraka, he is well known in the Central North Island.
Denis can be contacted on:
  • Mob: 021 556 993
  • Email: dcollins@pastoralrobotic.co.nz


0 Comments

Data shows 40% reductions in nitrate leaching

9/14/2019

0 Comments

 
Results from recent winter trials of NitroStop® show nitrate leaching reductions of greater than 40%. Pastoral Robotics has two lysimeter facilities, each with 40 lysimeters, one in Canterbury and the other in the Manawatu but loaded with Central North Island soils. Lysimeters are tubes filled with undisturbed soil and pasture from which all leachate is collected for analysis, (see news Feb 19th 2019, http://www.pastoralrobotics.co.nz/news, for more information. (Note that dairy sourced nitrate leaching comes from the very high levels of nitrogen in cow urine patches.)

Over winter the objective of our NitroStop® treatment is to keep the urine nitrogen locked in the soil so that when the ground starts to warm it can be used by pasture to increase growth, (this is a win for the farmer and a win for the environment). Geoff Bates, MD of Pastoral Robotics, commented The current winter has been particularly wet with plenty of opportunity for leaching, we have measured plenty of exciting results. In one situation measuring a 100% reduction in nitrate leaching.

The graphs below compare the leaching reductions with two different NitroStop®  treatment formulations that act on completely different microbes - it is reasonable to expect that the two treatments can be applied together and the total reduction in leaching could be additive.

The results to date are game changing but we are not stopping here - we have lots of ideas to test in the coming months to make nitrate leaching from Urine patches a thing of the past!
Lachlan McKenzie (Chairman Pastoral Robotics) is jubilant saying we have the machine to detect urine patches post grazing and now we have the treatments in NitroStop® to revolutionise our thinking on controlling leaching from urine patches. 

​Spikey® reduces nitrogen losses by growing more grass and is available now for commercial sales.
Picture
Picture
0 Comments

Fieldays Presentation, June 12th 2019

7/17/2019

0 Comments

 
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.
0 Comments

February 19th, 2019

2/19/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Lysimeters are tubes of undisturbed earth (see sketch to the right) 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.
​
Next we will be repeating these trials to our new (larger) 50cm diameter lysimeter facility (see photo below) for autumn trials in April 2019.

Picture
0 Comments

Spikey® features on Features on Rural Delivery

4/9/2018

1 Comment

 
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
​

1 Comment

DCD equivalence for NitroStop™

4/7/2018

0 Comments

 
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.
See ​NitroStop™
0 Comments
Forward>>

    Archives

    May 2021
    December 2020
    February 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    February 2019
    April 2018

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All

Productivity

Picture

Profitability

Picture

Clean Streams

Picture

Solutions

Spikey®
NitroStop™

Contact

Ph: 020 4 ROBOTS, 020 476 2687
Email: info@pastoralrobotics.co.nz
Address: 40 Kenwyn Street, Parnell, Auckland 1052

© COPYRIGHT 2015. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • Spikey®
  • NitroStop™
  • Fertiliser
  • About
  • News
  • Contact
  • Data Input