About us

The Smart Farming Program is a not-for-profit organisation which promotes sustainable land management by New Zealand’s pastoral farmers.  Funded largely by the Tindall Foundation, the Smart Farming Program provides farmers with tools that enable them to measure their farm's environmental performance.  

The Smart Farming Program is delighted to introduce the SmartFarms environmental monitoring system.  Smart Farms provides a simple and credible system of collating environmental health information.  We believe this is an essential first step to building reliable communication with markets and achieving long term credibility around a premium NZ brand for natural foods.

The SmartFarms system is based on three principles:

1. Maximising long-term sustainable profitability.  

• SmartFarms measures and monitors the key resources that must be maintained – particularly soils.
• Provides key measurements that inform management of soil to achieve good plant growth.
• Long term monitoring of nutrient (P) and organic matter levels will inform careful application of fertilsers.​

2. Achieving and demonstrating high environmental performance.


• Assess water quality, soil health, and our wider environmental management across the landscape.
• Rapid entry / upload of measurements, images etc to an online database, enabling farmers to make available information about the performance of their farming operation.
• Show the progress we are making, the standards we are achieving and providing this in a credible way based on monitoring key indicators. 
• Gain and maintain community support for our farming systems and assisting engagement with regulators and others.

3. Demonstrate the integrity of our farm products to gain access to high-value markets.

• The environmental health evidence collected by SmartFarms provides a standard and auditable set of information on the farm. 
• This can be linked to the product as it moves through the supply chain and can be communicated end customers.

For more information about us and our purpose, please view our Position Statement.

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