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June 2002

IN THIS ISSUE

Welcome

Staff Matters

PAM QA Plus

Recent Developments

Rogers Ramblings

PocketPAM News

Dealer News

In Closing

 

Welcome

Welcome to our June 2002 newsletter. We hope the past few months have been favourable for you. The winter season here in Australia has opened in its usual patchy fashion. Some areas have had good rains, some not so good.. We hope things pan out favourably in the months ahead.

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Staff Matters

For the first time in a long while there have been no changes to the staff here at Fairport.
Shorna Hewison, our Office Administrator before Jodie arrived, called in the other day to let us know she will not be rejoining us in July. She has been offered a position managing a beauty salon on a part-time basis. So we wish her well for her future.
Both Roger and Paul have recently purchased new houses and have settled in well.
Between now and our September newsletter, Ben is expecting his girlfriend Natasha to move across from Broken Hill to join him. He is looking forward to that and at the same time a huge reduction in his telephone accounts.

PAM QA Plus

PAM QA Plus uptake has been excellent. The feedback has also been great - Thank you all.
Many Fairport Club Members were not aware that they were entitled to PAM QA Plus for free. Yes - indeed. Fairport Club Membership entitles you to free incremental upgrades and PAM QA Plus is an incremental, not a major, upgrade.

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Recent Developments

The Fairport development team continue to enhance our product range.
The mapping module has received some attention, in particular FarmStar and the gpMapper Live sections. gpMapper Live is now very "slick" and is enjoyed by those using it. The feedback has been excellent.
FarmStar users will be pleased to hear we are adding a facility which will enable them to set colours for specific data ranges when generating images. Another development under way which will be very useful for setting up variable rate project recipe maps. VRT maps will be set up by interactively analysing and comparing the images made from several data sets (eg. Yield. pH, EM etc).
Have you had a look around the Fairport web site lately? The site continues to grow. In the recent months we have added listings of all new features added to our products.
The FAQ section has been added and is regularly updated. This section has the answers to the most frequently asked support questions.
If you are having a problem using a product outside our office hours, you may find the answers to your questions on our web site rather than waiting to call us the following working day.
Your feedback on our web site is always welcome. Please let us know if there are more facilities or information web pages you require.
We are still trialling the Pocket PC handheld mapping software (SmartMap) that was mentioned in the March newsletter. It is not quite ready for release at this stage. But stay tuned for more information on that front in the near future.

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Rogers Ramblings

I recently travelled to South Africa to attend the NAMPO Field Days in Bothaville. I was able to have a good "catch up" with the hierarchy of KEE Technologies of South Australia who were also at the field days.
Our distributors (and KEE's) in that area, Senwes, attracted plenty of attention with their excellent precision farming and farm mapping displays. Senwes are using our gpMapper Live and FarmStar programs extensively. Variable Rate Application technology is very advanced in the maize growing areas of South Africa and Senwes are at the forefront of this action. Huge savings in fertiliser bills without loss in yields have been achieved.
Senwes staff, in particular Edward Oosthuisen, have been "live" gpMapping farms and the soil types zones on a multitude of farms in the North West Province and the Free State. This data is used to set up the Variable Rate "Recipe" Maps.
I took Marina (my wife) with me on this South African leg and we took some time out to see some game reserves, lion breeding centres, wineries and of course some of the wonderful scenery.
From South Africa I travelled on to the USA (California) to train our PAM distributors, David Orr & Linda Yenni of Callide Solution Inc.
Callide Solutions operate from Sonoma Valley and offer advice and services to the vineyards of the Napa and Sonoma valleys and beyond.
Linda is very familiar with the wine industry here in Australia. She worked for Rosemount for a number of years and more recently was involved in the purchase of the Wingarra group while she was employed by Frexienet USA.
I was very fortunate to be invited to a lunch meeting of people involved in the economics of wine production in the Napa and Sonoma valleys. It was fascinating to listen to the key speaker who quoted a myriad of statistics to do with production and marketing of the local wine. Later that day I was taken on a tour of the Jaeger vineyards (1500 acres) and the Rutherford Hill winery.
We look forward to working with Callide as they introduce PAM to their clients. Jaeger Vineyards have volunteered to be our test site for PAM UltraCrop and we have some enthusiastic producers standing by to put it to use once it has been successfully put through its paces.

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PocketPAM News

Since the release of PAM QA Plus we have been working on enhancements to Pocket PAM (in particular the Pocket PC version which is still lagging behind the Palm OS version in some features). . Anyone who is running either Palm or Pocket PC versions of PocketPAM and have not yet upgraded to the mid-June version (3.0.4) should do so. All those clients whose email addresses we have on record were notified. The general consensus from the PocketPAM users is that it has been a brilliant idea. We are delighted with the amount of very positive things people are telling us. At this stage the Palm handheld platform is our preferred option. We have had difficulty with the Microsoft Active Sync software and have made good progress in resolving some of these difficulties. We are continuing to address these issues and hope that very soon we are able to recommend both Pocket PC and Palm handheld computers equally.

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Dealer News

Our clients and friends in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia will find a supplement from our distributors (Farmtek Australia and AgBis) in this newsletter. We hope you like this concept and we hope the concept will continue.

In Western Australia the Booth team have stepped up their marketing campaign for the Fairport product range and their efforts have been extremely well rewarded for the calendar year to date. The second half of the year will bring on the spring field day season and give our clients a chance to catch up with all the latest developments at those events.

Any clients wanting training on any of our product range should contact one of our distributors. For the complete list, go to our web site and look for the Distributors page or contact our office. All our Australian distributors offer Farmbis funded training courses on our products. Please take advantage of them.
Our man in New Zealand, Gavin McEwen of Xen-Agri, has been making sales and getting considerable interest in the intensive agriculture and horticulture areas. Gavin was once the national marketing manager of the farm software company that distributed PAM in the late 1980's… so we go back a long way. Gavin's company produces software for vegetable seed producers and has a lot of opportunities to speak with people in the horticultural sector.

In Closing

Once again, the Fairport Team sends thanks to all our new clients for coming aboard and putting your faith in our products. We also thank all those who give us feedback on our products and efforts.
If you think we are doing a good job, tell others. If you think we could do better, tell us. We are continually striving to improve our products and service.
We hope the season ahead is record breaking for you all. In Australia it seems we have a very patchy start to the winter cropping season. Let's hope it "patches out" and gives us all a good year.

Until September…
Best Wishes from the Fairport Team !

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