We now have pasture analytics in MyFarmbot, powered by Cibo Lab's satellite technology. This guide explains how this works and how it can be used to support your property's feed availability.
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What is SkyGrazing?
SkyGrazing provides pasture availability and quality analysis across your land. It uses 5km wide circular zones (called Pasture Zones) to give you a bird's-eye view of your pasture conditions.
With this information, you can track how your pastures respond to seasonal changes and understand their capacity to support livestock. MyFarmbot maps this data over time on an interactive graph, helping you monitor pasture performance.
How does the technology work?
The service captures world-leading satellite imagery which is then passed through machine learning algorithms to deliver estimates of Total Standing Dry Matter (TSDM) across the entire farm. It accounts for influences such as solar illumination, atmospheric effects and cloud cover to ensure image consistency.
This integration is available on MyFarmbot's Map View, no additional hardware is required. You can easily add and move Pasture Zones over your paddocks/land to start experiencing the benefits.
👉 How accurate are the estimates?
Cibo Labs currently have over 6000 GPS-located field sites being used to train the model. It is currently predicting over a range of ~8000kg/ha, the median prediction error is <200kg/ha with an r-square correlation of 0.85 which means the pasture growth predictions have an 85% accuracy rate.
It's important to note that landscapes and pasture systems are highly complex and there will often be anomalies where more field data is required to improve predictions (there are no silver bullets).
How do I enable it?
Contact the Farmbot Sales team to enable a subscription for adding Pasture Zones onto your account.
The 'Add' button will then appear across your sites, click it and then click the Pasture Zones card.
The first Pasture Zone will then appear, drag the circle to the area you'd like to receive pasture analytics information for.
Click 'Done'.
What Features are available?
Referring to the image above:
Pasture Zone - A 5 km circular zone that uses colour coding to represent the availability of feed in different parts of the zone.
Legend - A guide that explains how each colour corresponds to a range of feed density, helping you quickly see how much feed is available in specific areas.
Pasture Zone Drawer - Displays a detailed breakdown of the quality of dry matter, separating Green from Dry. You can also access the historical graph and make adjustments to your Pasture Zones from this section.
Layers - Turn the Pasture Zones on or off as needed, letting you customise the map view based on your current focus.
5. Summary Bar - Provides additional key data, including Groundcover (the percentage of plant material dead or alive that covers the soil surface) and Area (the total land area covered by the Pasture Zone).
6. Interactive Graph - Displays pasture performance over time. In the example above, you can track recent growth patterns, such as significant increases due to rainfall.