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3D animal scanning app up for award at Fieldays

3D animal scanning app up for award at Fieldays

RNZ News19 hours ago

Scanabull team Dan Bull (left) and Daniel Stuart-Jones. Missing Paul Schlumbom and Paul Sealock.
3D scan of a cow (right).
Photo:
Scanabull
Scanabull founder Dan Bull using the app.
Photo:
Supplied / Scanabull
Fieldays is back for another year, kicking off next week at Hamilton's Mystery Creek.
It's the Southern Hemisphere's largest agricultural event and is well known for launching cutting edge technology in the farming sector.
Scanabull is one of the finalists for this year's Innovation Awards - they've developed an app that allows farmers to take a 3D scan on an animal, to determine its weight - something that will help save time and money, while also reducing the number of trucks on roads at the same time.
Scanabull's founder Dan Bull speaks to Susie and Mihi.

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"It's about an auditable verifiable objective method and it's really important we do that to make sure we're setting rates objectively and there's a fair comparison… it's doing the best we can with the data set. "The different data sets will give different outcome. But if you look at the individual sales, none of them have been below CV so even with a small data set it's extremely unlike that the market values are below the old CVs in Muriwai." But why does the value of your home affect the rates you pay? The total rates bill the council decides to collect from homeowners each year is split across all the properties in the city. But the split is not even - more expensive places tend to pay more in rates. Whether you pay the same proportion of the total bill as you did in the last valuation round depends on how your property's valuation moves compared to everyone else's. If you own an Auckland property that has dropped in value by more than 9 percent, you will probably have less of an increase in rates than people whose property has increased in value by dropped by less than 9 percent, or even increased. Davidson said that could be a point of contention for Muriwai ratepayers but they could challenge the valuations if they wanted to. Why don't rates bills drop when values do? The valuations don't set the overall council rates bill, just how it's apportioned out. Councils decide how much they need to collect and that can (and usually does) increase even if the value of properties in their area is flat or falling. Do values affect sales prices? Not really. The valuations in Auckland, for example, are almost a year old now. They might have provided a good indication of what a place was worth at this time last year, but things have changed since then. CoreLogic's data shows that most parts of Auckland have had further prices falls since 2024. Davidson said people who were in the market for a home would pay attention to CVs but it was generally a better idea to look for more recent sales to get an idea of what the market was doing. "It's about establishing a fair value now, not what the property might have sold for a year ago when the CVs were 'set'." Sometimes you can get an idea of how far generally property prices are from their CV in a certain area, but that would still only be a guide. Is there a better way? Davidson's colleague Nick Goodall told Nine to Noon there was merit in the idea of shifting away from a dollar-based valuation to a system where properties were grouped into deciles. Tucker said the current process did require a lot of work, a lot of time and a lot of cost to get to its outcome. 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