Frequently Asked Questions

I am not used to making payments over the Internet with my credit card. Is the payment to Rotation safe?

A.     Rotation credit card payments are protected by a Comodo SSL Web Server Certificate for encryption.  This means any critical information sent to our server is impossible to intercept or steal. Also we at Rotation do not handle your payment; nor see your card information. It goes directly to our bank.

Can you assure me that a specific farm data I enter into Rotation remains confidential between me and Rotation?

A.     Yes - the individual subscriber accounts can only be accessed by you with your password or by us with our administrator logon. The database is located on a secure server housed in a physically secure building. In the future data may be analysed in the aggregate to report trends or practices by region. Which will enable us to improve our service, however, your farms individual information will never be divulged.

Does your administrator's role therefore enable you at Rotation to view my farm’s information?

A      To operate a satisfactory help service, we at Rotation need to be able to see where you may be having problems using the program. Our help system is based on the "LiveHelp" feature letting you to talk to us in real time by a typed message in a screen window. This enables us to both view your simulation and tell you how to fix any problem directly on line with you. This feature is especially useful for clients connecting by a single phone line to both their phone and computer.

How do you know if more than one property is using a rotation subscription?

A.     Irregular use will only become an issue if the Rotation service and trust is abused. Such abuse is readily identified by frequent changes being made to key farm data inputs. However, we trust that it will not be necessary to limit the individual farm parameters to the set first entered at the time of your initial subscription as this makes the service inflexible and less useful.

You have only provided three feed policy options, which seem very similar. Can I have a feeding policy made available to suit my particular needs?

A.     The feeding policies currently available can be significantly different in their effect on the quality and waste of the pasture being made available to your herds or mobs over the longer term. The current policies were found by us to be the most useful to a particular style of farming. However, please e-mail us an outline of your requirements for an additional feed policy which you believe would improve the Rotation service and if it is practical to program in, it may be added to the site. (rotation@farm.net.nz )

I have carefully entered all the data requested. But when I run the simulation it always runs out of feed, when I believe it should not. What is causing this?

A.     Our own experience from when we first started using rotation caused me to relearn the realities of feeding. Our earlier "we know best" approach to feeding had clearly involved a lot of fudging of the "rules" we thought we was applying to our grazing management. The structure of Rotation requires that the next paddock selected to be fed must have sufficient feed available above the threshold for that day otherwise the simulation will halt. By adjusting your feeding parameters and rerunning the simulation you will learn where the critical limits of your farms rotation plan lie. It is this process of trial, revision and rerunning the simulation that will give you a better feel for managing the grazing rotation on your farm.