Nitrogen reporting quick guide

From July 2022, all dairy farmers must provide their annual nitrogen (N) use for the year 1st July to 30th June to their local regional council.

How do I get started?

• Check your farm map is accurate and complete. If you don't yet have a HawkEye login, have a look here about how to join up.
• Ensure your nitrogen fertiliser applications are recorded in HawkEye. GPS tracked fertiliser proof of placement can be provided by Ravensdown Joint Venture spreaders, your TracMap guided spreading contractor and C-Dax spreader units. You can also manually record where you have spread fertiliser.

Once you have nutrient usage recorded for the year, HawkEye can provide correctly formatted reporting after a few simple steps. These steps are needed to ensure the N-Cap reporting meets regional council requirements of reporting by land use category.

Creating your Nitrogen Report

• Create a landholding
  This is a contiguous land area (area of adjoining land) being farmed that you will use to report your N use.  You can create more than one landholding if you have non-contiguous areas on farm.
  
• Create a new report
  Select the year you wish to report.
• Assign land categories
  These define what use your land was in during the reporting year.  The categories are:
  • Grazed pasture
  • Grazed forage crops
  • Grazed harvest crops
  • Ungrazed land

An area can have multiple land categories over the year.

Nitrogen Reporting
After creating your landholding and assigning your land categories, a simple push of a button will create your nitrogen use reports ready for you to provide for your local regional council. There are three sections to the report:

• Nitrogen Report
  This will show the total nitrogen applied in kg and the average nitrogen applied across all land categories as well as an average across the total grazed land area. The information to be provided to council will include the grazed land, grazed forage, grazed non-forage and ungrazed land nitrogen figures. 
• Product Application report 
  This will include a list of products applied, their N% and the dates applied.
• Sales Report
  This will include a list of all N based purchases made on your account.  Your purchases do not need to exactly match your applications as their may be purchases for outside the dairy or for multiple farms on the same account. 

How does the calculation work?

HawkEye will look at all nitrogen-based applications for the reporting year and allocate them to the correct land category in the given time ranges. It will then calculate for each land category the total N applied and average kg/N/ha for the year. It will also give an overall figure for the grazed land. The report will also calculate a figure for grazed non-forage land which is made up of the grazed pasture and grazed harvest crops.

For the grazed forage figure, if a paddock is in a forage crop at any point of the year, all the applications to that paddock will be included in the grazed forage crop nitrogen figure rather than the grazed non-forage crop figure due to the legislation.