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Fairport News

Historical FTI news articles and PRESS RELEASES
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March 2006

IN THIS ISSUE

» Welcome
» Rogers Ramblings
» GreenSeeker
» PAM News
» Pastures from Space / Pasture Watch News
» Dealer News

» In Closing

Welcome to delayed March newsletter. Time has flown past again and caught us out. However, better late than never.

We hope the year to date has been treating you well. With the US exchange rate dropping to near 70 cents, commodity prices should be turning in our favour. Let’s hope farm production prices improve during the year.
A special big welcome to all the new Fairport clients. Welcome especially to those of you who have migrated across from Pin.Point. Apologies to you people for the delays in getting the Pin.Point to PAM data migration program up and running. This certainly proved to be more of a challenged than we’d hoped for.

Life here at Fairport has continued to run at a hectic pace. While this is typically a quieter time for our support staff, it has been full pace for the developers. Our PAM Enterprise clients have kept us busy developing enhancements for that system, Pasture Watch has undergone a general overhaul in readiness for the coming winter season, Grape Forecaster has required some small fixes and some enhancements while the Mapping modules for PAM and the gpMapper and FarnStar Lite programs have had several new features added. Meanwhile, a good number of new features have gone into the non-enterprise versions of PAM.
As mentioned above, we finally managed to put together the Pin.Point to PAM data migration program. Edin, our newest recruit managed to get his head around both the PAM and Pin.Point systems in the process. It was a good and steep learning curve for him. Since then he has built a data migrator for our NZ Landcorp job where we heeded to migrate data from their old Farm Trading software into their new PAM Enterprise platform. Edin has become our resident data migration guru!

The feedback from the dealer network is giving me the impression that things are pretty busy ‘out there’. All have reported that they have been doing lots of training and making lots of sales over these past few months.

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To find out what Greenseeker is and what it can do for you, please visit the new Greenseeker web page on the Fairport web site. On there you will find a list of Australian and New Zealand Greenseeker dealers as well as some explanations about the technology.

To date there has been good enquiry and several sales. A vineyard trial was carried out in Clare late January to test the NDVI mapping system. And more trial work is due to occur in vines, cereals and cotton later this year.
Those of you who subscribe to the “Grain Business” magazine can find a very comprehensive Greenseeker article in the February March 2006 edition by Graeme Jennings focusing on the work done by Richard Heath in NSW.

For more information, please visit www.ntechindustries.com or call Roger Wiese at Fairport for PDF manuals and other materials. In due course we will set up web pages to advertise these systems.

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PAM Enterprise News

Landcorp Farming Limited in New Zealand will finally “go live” with PAM Enterprise this month (April) after 7months of hard work developing extra functionality in PAM and developing software in conjunction with Hewlett Packard NZ to interface PAM with the Microsfot Navision accounting software.

This work has been challenging and interesting for us all. So far this year we have had Michael Barker in Wellington for two stints and Roger went there again for another stint and will be going again before the end of the month. There will quite a lot more work to do in PAM before we are done. The next section to get a full overhaul will be the IAR section.
Other new PAM Enterprise clients include Saratoga Holdings, one of the world’s biggest macadamia nut growers with properties in NSW, QLD and South Africa. Saratoga have had us build several new features into the PAM Enterprise system for their needs and more work is in the pipeline.

Two Perth based agribusiness investment companies, The Rewards Group and Great Southern Plantations have also installed PAM Enterprise in the past few months.

PAM Destop Versions News

The following items have been added or fixed in PAM since our last newsletter. :

• PAM AusVit and UltraCrop: You can now specify a sort order when selecting Rows via the Area Selection screen.

• PAM AusVit and UltraCrop: Block / Vine Layouts : You can now specify custom Row Numbers when configuring Sections and Rows for a given Block / Vine layout.

• PAM AusVit and UltraCrop: Chemical Applications : If you changed the Water Rate value PAM was not including the Concentration Factor value in calculating a Units per 100L value.

• Livestock Diary : Filter by Activity selections were being cleared after Diary closed and reopened. Now fixed.

• Reports: Planned Spray Worksheet Report : PAM now displays a Report Options screen.

• Import / Export Data: CBH Harvest Load Data XML File import : New XML File format has changed for Date values. Updated PAM's import facility to reflect this.

• Inventory: Stock Taker : Added an option to display Items which have been previously marked as Totally Consumed but still have a quantity greater than 0. This is to assist you in correcting adjustment or usage records.

• Configuration: Perennial Crops : Retired Season : Updated the configuration of Perennial Crop's retired season pick list to display 5 years either side of the minimum and maximum use of the crop.

• Data Entry: Chemical Activity : When recording a Chemical Activity, PAM sets the default Spray Conditions to the last job you recorded. If you then move forwards or backwards in the Wizard, PAM was resetting any changes you may have made to the Spray Conditions.

• Data Entry: Converting Budget or Recommendation Cropping Record to Plan : PAM was not creating a new Plan Number. Now Fixed.

• Reports: Planned Chemical Spray Worksheet report : Report was displaying "Crop (0)" in the Areas section for Paddock/Block areas.

• Inventory: Inventory of Consumables : Stock Take and Stock On Hand Reports : You can now generate a Stock Take / Stock On Hand report with or without Batch Numbers and Locations specified.

• New Budget Report: Showing your month by month expenditure and income, listed in a spreadsheet style layout, by the various expense and income items.

Mapping News

PAM Mapping, gpMapper and the FarmStar programs are now able to import additional image (farm photograph) file types. These long awaited improvements took place during early February. We can now import ER Mapper style “ECW” files and the Geotiff style “TIF” files. These file types come already geo-located.

You will notice a slight change in the File/Tools menu or File Import menu of these mapping systems. Previously to import an image you needed to go through the “Image Digitise” screen to do so. Now you can import images directly into the main mapping window. This means that when you select a file type that is already geo-located, it will import immediately and without fuss.

 

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Pasture Watch has had some work done to it to improve the graphs of Pasture Growth Rates. Western Australian Pastures from Space clients will be able to view Feed On Offer farm maps this year via Pasture Watch and all our “Collaborator” clients of previous years will now be able to manage their won farm maps in Pasture Watch.

Another major advancements has been the import of ESRI SHP files into Pasture Watch. The implications of that are that if you have had your farm mapped by a professional service previously, it will now be extremely easy for new clients to get their farms maps into Pasture Watch. Please called Edward here at Fairport for more information.

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AG-IT – NSW & QLD
Ag IT is up and running and Paul has been busy travelling NSW holding training sessions and visiting growers on farm.
We hope that the monthly AG IT email with Help notes, tips and tricks have been helpful and the service will continue for Ag IT support members.

Ag IT 2006 Calendar:
Beef 2006 3-6th May – ROCKHAMPTON
Cotton Trade Show 24-25th May MOREE

If you are attending these events drop in and say hello.

A free online data ware house service has been created for Ag IT support members on the Ag IT web site.
Backups are important and using them when needed even more so. Use this service to keep an off site backup and peace of mind. Ag IT support members may create a login to the online data warehouse service. Store your PAM QA Plus backups off site by uploading them to the Ag IT web server:
www.agit.com.au/warehouse.
All you have to do is fill in your details, validate your email address by clicking on the link you receive in your inbox and you are free to start using the service. The free service limits you to 20 MB of space, if you require more, please contact Ag IT.

Paul will be travelling through Queensland starting in May, so if you have any training requirements, please contact Ag IT on these details:
Ag IT
PO Box 298
LISMORE NSW 2480
Ph/Fax: (02) 6624 7230
Mobile: 0419 727 086
Sales & Support: 1800 658 998
email: paul@agit.com.au

SA, VIC, TAS and Southern
NSW Distributors:
FarmTek Australia VIC
Joanne has been very busy with her large territory to look after. Recently she and Paul Drendal of DrenKo in Horsham attended the Wimmera Field Days. Between them they made plenty of PAM sales and converted a good number of Pin.point clients across to PAM.
Recently Joanne has been to South Australia and southern New South Wales for a training run and is always keen to hear from clients wanting her training services.
Please log on to www.farmetk.com.au to request training.
Joanne can also be contacted via one of the following:
M: 0429 930 770
O: 1300 553 446
F: 03 57951015
Email:Joanne@farmtek.com.au

Maelroan Computers WA
Hello everyone. It is great to be back at work full time. I am very busy catching up on bookings, as I was unavailable due to illness last year.
Currently, next available time is May, which is of course seeding time, so I would expect next bookings to start late June, for those who finish earlier.
Remember, as well as program training, I am a registered SQF Consultant, so can either help you develop a QA system, or upgrade your current system.
If you would like me to visit for training, it is important that you book ahead to ensure that you will not miss out. I have bookings as far ahead as next February/March. With the cost of fuel, we are very conscious of keeping travel costs as low as possible, so need to plan our trips carefully.

If you want to know where we will be over the next few months, you can go to our web site www.Maelroan.com.au and look at the calendar. You can also complete the form requesting training from the web site as well.
As a Farmbis registered trainer, I have many courses that qualify for the 50% rebate. This rebate applies if training is done for individual businesses or in groups.
It was great catching up with clients and meeting new ones at Wagin Woolorama recently.

I look forward to catching up with more clients in the following months.
A big thank you to Roger and his team for the invaluable support you afforded my clients during my illness. We all appreciated it very much.
Here’s to a great seeding. Hope the weather is kind.
Until next time,
Cheers

Liz Alford
Maelroan@bigpond.com
0428 910 122
www.Maelroan.com.au

WA Distributors:
Booth Technology

Contact Details:

Colin, Steve and Ben
T: 08 9383 4443
E: sales @ boothtech.com.au
www.boothtech.com.au

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The Fairport Team wishes all our clients well for the winter ahead.
Until June 2006 … Farewell from Roger Wiese and the Fairport Team