Photographs are an important tool for consultants and researchers. They are part of the data collection process and provide evidence of the state of vegetation or of specific features of importance in the landscape, like a rare species or illegal dumping.

Geotagging photographs is the process of adding a latitude and longitude to the photograph. All photo files come with an associated metadata file; the most common is the EXIF format, although there are others. If you look at the properties of one of your photographs, under the "details" tab, you will see a range of information about the photograph, right down to the focal length, f-stop and shutter speed, make and model of the camera, and of course the time the photo was taken (for some reason, in Windows, the time the photo was taken is labelled under "Date modified" not "Date created").

If your camera has a built-in GPS or you have a GPS accessory for your camera, you can automatically geotag your photos. Modern cellphones come with a geotagging option (you need to turn on the Geotagging in the camera settings). But what if you don't have that tool, and you have a batch of several hundred photos that need geotagging? You can't manually geotag them all in Picassa or Google Earth.

There are several software tools available online that can make the process a lot easier. The one that I've been using is a free tool called ExifTool. I'm going to explain how I use Exiftool to geotag several hundred photographs at a time, using separate GPS trackfiles.

Agricultural colleges have been teaching trainee farmers a precise, powerful, repeatable and completely inappropriate method of veld monitoring for decades.

One of the first things any serious livestock farmer will tell you is that they are not farming livestock, they’re farming grass.

The grass is the primary crop, converted into cash via the medium of a cow or a sheep or a springbok. But farming wild grass – veld in southern Africa - is not like farming other crops. The farmer has very little control over productivity. He cannot plough the fields and plant precisely the variety of crop that he wants, while carefully weeding out the undesirable ones. He has to deal with the normal vagaries of nature. And finally, he has the grazing itself, which affects the composition of different grasses and weeds in ways which, after more than a century of research, we barely have a handle on.

Simple, prescriptive formulae for how to manage nature don’t work in the long run. Farmers need to read the subtle signs of the veld and adapt, constantly tweaking their management, week to week, month to month and year after year. They need to decide when to put cows and calves into the veld based not on the calendar but on the grass itself. They need to move their animals following the signals of the veld, not the traditions of their fathers. And they need to decide when and where to burn following the same cues.