At the New Zealand National Agricultural Fieldays exhibition, Gen-i today announced a partnership with ANZCO Foods Ltd, Tru-Test, AgTrac and to develop a pilot RuralZone technology solution. RuralZone will enable users from across the rural supply chain to access, share and use information to increase productivity, efficiency and collaboration in the industry.

Hosted locally on Gen-i’s ReadyCloud Server, RuralZone brings together information from different sources allowing rural organisations, including farmers, processors, transporters, research bodies and retailers, to maximise the value of this information and achieve goals specific to their business.

David Walker, Gen-i’s Rural Market Manager, says RuralZone will integrate vital rural information to deliver its users benefits ranging from improved decision-making, increased productivity, capacity and resource planning through to reduced downtime, predicting farm tools and ensuring compliance and traceability.

“The New Zealand rural industry is facing increasing pressure to meet growing compliance requirements, operate sustainably, find suitable labour, ensure business continuity and improve productivity in a competitive global and consumer-driven marketplace. 

“Our rural market vision is to provide New Zealand's major export sector with integrated technology solutions nationwide that enable economic growth and bring prosperity to the New Zealand economy.

“Similar in the way EFTPOS creates a flow of information from bank to retailer and vice versa, RuralZone creates a two-way flow of information among rural players. RuralZone will be a secure ecosystem that allows for the safe and controlled transport of data throughout the rural sector. 

Alan McDermott, Agricultural Manager at ANZCO Foods Limited, says RuralZone will fill a technology gap in the rural industry and will change the way New Zealand’s rural sector does business.

“The development of RuralZone is of considerable value to the New Zealand agricultural industry, through the provision of an essential infrastructure and standards for data and data transfer. 

“RuralZone will play an important enabling role through the provision of a data pipeline service and will benefit the entire rural sector and the future prosperity of New Zealand. We are looking forward to working with Gen-i and the other partners, Tru-Test and AgTrac, on completing a successful pilot project and demonstrating the value of RuralZone to the industry,’’ says McDermott.

With the aim of farming more profitable animals and improving business efficiencies through the supply chain, the first phase of the pilot will focus on animal weight information. Animal weight data will be captured by Tru-Test on 10 farms, combined with additional data processed by FarmHQ (AgTrac), and then transferred to ANZCO via RuralZone. This will deliver additional value to farmers and end users, ensure compliance and traceability and will allow ANZCO to plan resources ahead of time to cull the animals and maximise plant efficiency.

An independent Advisory Board is proposed to provide advice and direction on complex issues, such as data ownership and the commercial structure. It will include rural industry executives from across the supply chain.

RuralZone will be delivered using Gen-i’s ReadyCloud Server - Gen-i’s locally-hosted Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) virtual server model. Hosting RuralZone on ReadyCloud Server will enable Gen-i to quickly scale the solution to meet client demand as well as provide capacity to test applications and roll out updates automatically to all users.

RuralZone began as a livestock proof-of-concept pilot conducted by Gen-i in 2008 with Integrated Foods Limited (IFL) and a project consortium of eight organisations. The pilot demonstrated the productivity gains that could be achieved through individual identification of animals (via RFID tagging) and capturing vital information on weight, drafting, and transporting. This flow of information to processing plants in advance of animals arriving resulted in faster speed to market through improved processing times, better planning and decision making.

RuralZone is a technology infrastructure, or data gateway, that creates a secure platform for business transactions, along with expert monitoring and auditing. Data sharing agreements will enable data to be shared by both the data consumer and supplier.

The RuralZone pilot project is expected to start in September 2010 and be complete by the end of the year, when Gen-i will look to bring further partners on board.