The pasture innovator

That thing on little wheels you see some dairy farmers towing behind a quad, somewhat aimlessly around the paddock, was designed and developed by a Hawera dairy farmer, Hayden Lawrence. Its humble appearance conceals some very sophisticated technology reports Stuff. It's a pasture meter, in which laser beams read the grass height 200 times every second and it's linked to a GPS device that plots where the measurements are made in the paddock. The information can be downloaded into a computer on to an aerial photo of the farm, and the user can see how many hours of grazing he has in any paddock. Mr Lawrence designed and built his rapid pasture meter as a thesis for the honours section to his Bachelor of Applied Science and Agriculture Engineering at Massey University. He and the university sold the manufacturing rights to C-Dax Ltd of Palmerston North and it's now their star performer, the C-Dax Pasture Meter. About 700 have been sold in this country and 100 to other countries. C-Dax calls it "a revolutionary product proving indispensable to strategic farming operations. Effectively increase your payout by 4.6c for every 1 per cent increase in grass utilisation". Up to the time the pasture meter was launched at the 2006 National Fieldays, the only other device available for pasture measurement was the falling (or rising) plate meter, which requires a walk diagonally across each paddock. The C-Dax Pasture meter measures while the bike is being driven at 20kmh and it doesn't matter who is driving - the result will be the same.