The Profitable Farming Company has introduced a novel system for recording and tracing big square bales.

Designed to work in conjunction with the firm’s hay preservative application system, microchip tags are secured to the strings as the bale leaves the baler. The tag’s unique reference number is stored in a data-logger along with an exact GPS location of where the bale was produced, its weight and the moisture content of the crop. The company says this brings baling into the world of precision farming for the first time and with GPS mapping, as well as providing traceability for forage suppliers, and will also allow arable producers to get a complete picture of straw yields.

All together, the price for the tagger and reader is £5900 and each tag costs 40p.