DairyBase Privacy Policy

DairyBase holds information that has been provided by you the farmer, or by your agents (your accountant, consultant or DairyNZ Consulting Officer) on your behalf. We may also hold information provided to DairyBase by third parties where you have given permission for those third parties to share this information with us.

We record contact and identification information (name, address, supply numbers) for each farm and contact details (name, address, phone, email) for the business owners. This allows us to manage our contact with you as DairyBase customers, and for your agents to identify your farm among their clients.

Farm data is collected on a seasonal basis. This does not obligate you to have your data entered every season but we do recommend this to get the most out of your analysis. Basic physical information is required for any analysis; this includes such items as milksolids, cows milked, hectares farmed and labour units. An optional Physical Detail analysis goes into more detail in areas such as feed usage and calving patterns.

Financial information can be entered to two levels. Profitability covers operational dairy revenues and expenses. A full financial analysis also covers balance sheet information including assets and liabilities, and personal expenditure. A financial analysis of either kind can involve the use of more than one set of accounts where relevant.

We collect your contact information from you when you register. In some cases farms may be created on DairyBase without registration for the purpose of processing in-house statistics, or to encourage clients to join. In these cases no owner contact information is stored and no farm data is included in any data extractions from DairyBase.

Information for the physical aspects of your business is collected directly from you, either by your nominated agents or by a DairyBase representative.

A financial analysis is entered from your standard set of tax accounts.

We may collect information about you when you deal with us over the telephone or send us correspondence (whether by letter, fax or email). This may be stored if it relates to the service that DairyBase provides to you.

We may also collect information about you and your farm from third parties, such as software providers, government agencies or banks, where it is relevant to the service that DairyBase provides. We will only do this where you have given your permission to these third parties to share this data with us.

On registration you receive a username and password. You are responsible for keeping this secure and DairyBase recommends that you change your password periodically.

When you log on the DairyBase system, a secure server is used. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypts the information you send through this web site. DairyNZ makes no warranty in respect of the strength or effectiveness of that encryption and DairyNZ is not responsible for events arising from unauthorised access of the information you provide.

We collect your personal information for the following purposes:

• To provide you and your nominated agents with farm analysis reports;
• To provide benchmarking information on reports;
• To provide industry with reliable statistical information (see Industry good use of personal information section below)

Information is only collected to the level required for the desired analysis for the season.

You and your nominated agents can log in and request reports as soon as data has been finalised for your farm. Under your DairyBase login you can limit the types of data that your agents can access, and whether they can download spreadsheet versions of reports. You can also add authorisations for other agents to access your data, or remove ones who are currently showing.

Data is aggregated within DairyBase for the purposes of producing benchmark data. A system benchmark needs a minimum of 20 farms meeting the specified criteria before the benchmark becomes available to appear on the reports. This maintains both confidentiality and a minimal level of statistical relevance. (Note that individual farm benchmarks are available where the farm owner has specifically authorised that the data be made available in this manner).

DairyBase staff occasionally view client reports for the purposes of help desk enquiries, or for data integrity purposes. No other DairyNZ staff can view your reports without your permission.

Farm data:

DairyBase data is used to provide the dairy industry with reliable information

• To monitor the performance of the industry
• For approved research projects
• To help develop services to assist the industry
• To inform government policies that will affect the industry

For this purpose farms are extracted from the database but no contact information is provided with the data sets.

Contact information:

DairyNZ holds a customer relations database of New Zealand dairy farmers to record their use of DairyNZ products and services. You may be marked as a DairyBase client on this database along with a summary of activity, but no other information will be provided by DairyBase. 

DairyBase may be approached for purposes of research projects to contact farmers meeting certain criteria (e.g. high performing). In these instances DairyBase will provide you with details of the project and offer you the opportunity to participate.

You can log on to DairyBase and change your privacy settings if you do not want to be approached regarding research projects.

We may engage third party contractors to perform services for us which involves the contractor handling personal information we hold. In these situations, we prohibit the third party contractor from using personal information about you except for the specific purpose for which we supply it.

At times DairyBase data at the industry level may be shared with third parties, such as government agencies, industry bodies, banks or farm service providers, in order to ensure that these parties are utilising accurate information when setting policies or developing services that will have an impact on the dairy farming industry. In such situations, all data will be anonymised and aggregated to prevent identification of individual farm businesses or owners.

We will not disclose personal information to external parties, other than DairyBase businesses, unless legally required to do so.

You can update your personal or farm contact information yourself under your DairyBase login. You can also view the farm data that has been entered on your behalf. There may occasionally be information stored offline in order for DairyBase to maintain services, for example DairyBase Support Centre charging information.

We will, on request, provide you with access to all information we hold about you, unless there is an exception which applies under the National Privacy Principles. We may recover from you our reasonable costs of supplying you with access to this information.

We take reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information is accurate, complete, and up-to-date whenever we collect or use it.

You can view and update your contact details yourself through your DairyBase login. We encourage you to keep these up to date.

Your farm data is validated when entered and then committed as final. If you think that it may be incorrect and would like to update it then contact your Accountant or Consultant, or contact us at DairyBase to review it with you.

You can have yourself and/or any of your farms deregistered at any time. Your dormant profile will remain on DairyBase and can be reactivated if required. If you prefer that all contact information is removed then you can specify this at time of deregistration.

DairyBase data may be stored on servers or data centres that are physically located overseas. Access to this data will be controlled by DairyNZ.

Aggregated and anonymised industry level data from DairyBase may occasionally be shared with overseas third parties for industry good purposes. In particular DairyNZ works with other dairy industry good organisations, such as Dairy Australia, and aggregated and anonymised industry level data from DairyBase may be shared with them.

No individual information from DairyBase is transferred directly to third parties overseas, other than for data storage purposes.

Information generated from DairyBase data, such as research reports or the Economic Survey, may be posted on public websites.

If you wish to gain access to your personal information, have a complaint about a breach of your privacy or you have any query on how your personal information is collected or used, then please forward your concern to the address below. We will respond as soon as possible.

Privacy complaints about our acts or practices may be investigated by the Privacy Commissioner who has the power to make a determination.