Ōpunake dairy farmer Angeleigh Young is saving hours of travel time and stress by controlling electric fences on her family’s farming operation with the tap of a button on her phone.
Angeleigh manages a 160-hectare dairy farm owned by her mother-in law, Adrienne. She installed a Gallagher iSeries M6000i energizer to power up the property’s electric fences, which she uses alongside Gallagher’s Gateway to control the farm’s entire electric fence system. The Gateway enables Wi-Fi connection so Angeleigh can manage it all from the Gallagher Ag Devices App on her phone.
“It’s just so easy to use,” she says. “We set up the energizer in the pump shed which is about 800 metres from the cowshed and installed the Gallagher Gateway for Wi-Fi connection. We downloaded the App and it was ready to go.”
Before installing the system, turning the energizer on and off was a hassle. Angeleigh would have to travel back and forth between the pump shed and wherever she was moving stock or trying to fix electric fence faults. It was time consuming and frustrating.
With the Gallagher system Angeleigh can control the power to her fences with the push of a button on her phone.
“The system will also alert me when there is a fault or if power isn’t getting to the fences. It gives you peace of mind the fences are always working, and our cows are where they are meant to be,” she says.
“You can turn the fence off, check one part of the fence and move to the next and turn it back on again when you’re done. No more travelling up and down the farm to switch the energizer on and off.”
The farm supplies Fonterra and Angeleigh milks 280 cows at peak, producing about 115,000 kg/MS per season. She also breeds all their herd replacements and has young stock both on the home farm and two adjacent runoff blocks that connect to the milking platform.
“The next step for us is to install monitors at our runoff blocks so we can run the entire electric fence operation in zones. Doing that will mean I will be able to turn individual zones on or off without impacting the entire farm,” says Angeleigh.
When Angeleigh’s husband Kieran is helping out on the farm, he can also control the fences from the App on his own phone.
“Kieran doesn’t work on the farm every day, but sometimes he helps. For example, he manages our oxidation ponds which are surrounded by fences. He has the App on his phone, and it means he can drop the fences himself to manage the ponds without me having to do it.”
Angeleigh also knows when her mother-in-law Adrienne is out working on the fences, because she receives an alert on her phone when the fences are powered off.
“I’ve also had contractors come and do maintenance work on the farm or deliver things when I’ve been busy. I can let them through by powering off the fences without even being on site. The system is such a time saver,” says Angeleigh.
The system has also proven its worth with young stock who Angeleigh says can be “Houdini’s” getting through fences and into areas they are not supposed to be in.
“If stock get over a fence where they’re not meant to be, I just power off the fence from my phone. Shift them back onto the right side and power it up again. It’s so simple and stress free.”