Speaking at a Beef + Lamb event at Bare Hill farm in Otapiri Gorge, Stag Valley owner Simon Saunders, of Castlerock, said he had been using modelling and decision support tool Farmax on his sheep and beef for many years.
Farmax was commercially launched in 2003.
"It was a really good product but it was really clunky to use in the early days and we got close to walking away a couple of times but we stuck at it."
The FarmIQ app had revolutionised the software.
"It is a pretty fantastic product now."
Stag Valley runs a Headwaters breeding programme and supplies Lumina.
All lambs were given an electronic identification tag and the software helped provide "exciting" insights on individual animal performance, such as growth rates.
The software data would help sheep and beef farmers improve production per hectare and compete with other land uses, such as carbon farming, cropping, dairy grazing and forestry.
Lamb kill sheet data on intramuscular fat levels of individual lambs allowed Stag Valley staff to use the Farmax software to find what paddock the best performers for that trait had been grazing in.
Stag Valley staff also used the software to track livestock movements, feed availability and fertiliser application, he said.
In addition, the software helped his business prove compliance with regulations and record health and safety incidents, such as near misses.
Mr Saunders said any software in a farm business needed to be easy-to-use and become part of the daily routine for staff.
"It is really easy to have great software but if you’re not using it properly, you’ll never get make it pay and get a return on it."
The insights were only as good as the data it was drawing from.
"If we want to be successful and drive really good decision-making and good data insights, the only way artificial intelligence is going to revolutionise how are going to farm is having fantastic data sets."
To motivate staff to use the technology, he offered them a one-off cash bonus at the end of the year if they populated the software with at least 90% of the required data.
"It was amazing how habits changed very quickly."
Bare Hill sheep and beef farm owners Nick and Alexis Wadworth spoke about using Resolution farm management software on the property.
"It has been awesome," Mrs Wadworth said.
She also noted the app was only as good as the data put in it.
Other uses for the software included tracking the performance of different crops and stock classes in individual paddocks.
Being able to use the app to send new staff and contractors to an area on a map to complete a task was great, she said.
Once the task was complete it could be "ticked off" in the app.
The app helped them track where wild pigs and possums had been trapped and weeds, such as wilding pines, had been controlled to support environmental grants for the work, she said.
Mrs Wadworth said Resolution made farm assurance work, mapping for development work and break feeding "easy breezy".
Data on specific activities, such as weaning weights of livestock, could be compared between years and had been valuable.
"The world’s your oyster on how much data you want to put in."
