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.

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