The Australian Feedbase Monitor (AFM), a joint initiative by Cibo Labs and Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), is a powerful new tool designed to give every Australian red meat producer a "birds-eye view" of their pasture, at no cost.
Why You'll Love the AFM
This tool is perfect for producers who want to explore the power of satellite-assisted feed budgeting for free. It gives you objective data to support more accurate decision-making and provides a baseline for monitoring your land's long-term health.
It’s Free: As an MLA member with a Livestock Production Assurance (LPA) account, you get free access to the AFM. This allows you to test the power of satellite monitoring before deciding to invest in a premium service like PastureKey.
Property-Level Insights: Get a broad, property-scale view of your feed and ground cover. The AFM provides moderate resolution (1-hectare) data so you can check pasture levels in remote areas you can't physically get to.
Rolling Monthly Data: The data is updated every five days, giving you a rolling monthly picture of pasture biomass and ground cover. This helps you track changes in your feed supply and adjust your management plans throughout the year.
Monitor Long-Term Trends: The AFM's historical data is a game-changer. Compare pasture biomass levels every year back to 2017 and see how ground cover and woody vegetation have changed over the past 30 years.
How It Works
The AFM uses satellite imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 mission. This data is processed by Cibo Labs' constantly improving machine learning model, which is trained using on-the-ground pasture cuts from different land types and regions across Australia. The tool provides you with two key data overlays:
Pasture Biomass : A view of total standing dry matter (TSDM as kg/Ha) across each of your land parcels. This is a rapid and objective method for doing a property-level feed budget.
Total Cover: The percentage of ground covered by of plant material, both alive and dead, on the soil surface. This is a critical metric for managing fire risk and land condition.
Ready to get started?
If you are an Australian red meat producer, you can access the tool for free by linking your Livestock Production Assurance (LPA) account linked to your mymla.
The AFM is designed for broad, strategic planning, while PastureKey is our premium subscription service for detailed, tactical decision-making.
Resolution: The AFM provides data at a moderate 80m resolution (1ha), giving you a whole-of-property overview. PastureKey offers a much higher 10m resolution, allowing for precise, paddock-level analysis.
Information Level: The AFM gives you data at the property level, which is ideal for understanding feed trends and managing land at a broader scale. PastureKey uses your farm's specific fencelines to provide data for each individual paddock, which is essential for detailed feed budgeting and grazing rotations.
Cost: The AFM is free for all Australian red meat producers who are members of MLA. PastureKey is a paid annual subscription service.
To access the AFM for free, you must be a member of MLA and have a myMLA account with your Livestock Production Assurance (LPA) account linked to your profile. This is how the system identifies your property and provides access to your data.
The satellite imagery is captured every five days. The AFM then provides a rolling 30-day median of the data, which is updated every five days. This gives you a current, consistent picture of your property's pasture.
We currently have over 7500 GPS-located field sites being used to train the model.
Currently predicting over a range of ~8000kg/ha the median prediction error is <200kg/ha with an r-square correlation of 0.85. (needs updating)
Importantly, landscapes and pasture systems are highly complex and there will often be anomalies where more field data is needed to improve predictions (there are no silver bullets). In these situations we work with producers to coordinate data collection to improve predictions.
No, the 1-hectare resolution of the AFM is designed for property-level analysis and strategic planning, not for individual paddock-level feed budgeting. For that level of detail, we recommend the PastureKey subscription service.
