RFT Limited is an affiliate company set up to provide direct farmer services relating to projects not normally part of business planning and development services. These include:

• Consultancy on the tenure review of pastoral leases
• Projects supported by grants that will benefit agriculture (currently, the company has a GIS mapping project in the pipeline that will provide very accurate property maps)
• A Merino breed benchmarking group

Waitaki iGIS is a community development project to improve co-ordination between rural landholders, agencies and other organisations in initiatives for sustainable development of the Waitaki Lakes area. The aim is to help the community be more proactive about resource management through having access to the power of computer-based mapping that can effectively show the relationships between issues, people and places.

Easy to use, reliable and up-to-date resource information, maps and other imagery is needed to enable good decision-making. For landholders in SI hill and high country such data is scarce, often out dated or has never been produced at scales suitable for on-farm management.

This project will develop a process for farmers to readily access resource data held by research institutes and other organisations, by presenting it on maps (spatial layers) either as computer files or in hard copy prints, then providing techniques to help with identifying management and use options, and the effects of proposed actions.