Water monitoring in the digital age: Reducing stress and improving the efficiency of the ‘water run

Summary

The stock 'water run' is a daily task in arid Australian climates. In the summer months some farms commit a full-time employee to the job. The run usually entails checking stock water trough and tank levels for adequate water while identifying and fixing leaks along the way. At some pastoral farms a complete run around the property can take up to seven days and see staff covering over 200 km. This project aimed to identify a cost-effective alternative to the water run by using durable non-contact radar based sensors to measure water levels and relay that information to the cloud. The system focuses on providing farm staff with the tools to monitor trends and identify problems whether they are on or off farm.

Objectives

The objective was to demonstrate the capacity of digital technology on a working farm and show how the property owner can benefit from accessing and analysing data collected remotely.

Specifically, this project will supply, install and make operational the following digital components and services:

• 10 x water trough sensors
• 5 x water tank sensors
• 1 x grain silo level sensor
• Farm Monitoring Solutions Live Iot Subscription Professional Tier

Key findings

All future deployments will be based on a more robust internal circuitry hardware that was deemed necessary during the trial. This includes new connectors, improved battery capacity and system power regulation. With these changes we are able to provide quality tank and trough monitoring system for reducing the stress and time associated with the 'water run'. In addition, our improvements have pushed out our battery life expectations to 10 years while using an hourly measurement regime. Since deployment we have implemented a number of new hardware features including remote control of alarm levels and sensor sampling times. The radar units can also be remotely tuned for a full range of new level sensing applications.

Benefits to industry

Digital AgTech providers often make fictious claims about where their technologies and solutions are up to. Digital farms play an important role in vexing these claims and determining what red meat producers can deploy today and the value proposition behind each. The benefit of this project is the demonstration to producers that remote monitoring in areas where traditional connectivity is limited or non-existent is now commercially viable and, most importantly, reliable. The development of the wireless trough sensor provides producers with another option for trough monitoring solution, specifically targeting remote locations.

MLA action

The learnings from the Romani Digital demonstration farm project has helped shape the MLA Digital Agriculture business plan. A need has been identified to further test AgTech which is market ready with producers in real world situations to identify the use cases and value propositions of the solutions beyond the simple demonstration of them. This is guiding the current and future MLA investments in this space.

Future research

It was identified that as the number of sensors deployed increases, users can suffer from data overload. Filtering and searching for problems is not how we want users to spend their time. Instead, we have begun developing an insights engine for Waterwatch Live. This insights engine uses data analytics to generate knowledge specific to the producer's needs.

The insights planned include:

• Which systems are leaking?
• Where to go to fix the leaks?
• How much water resource is left?
• What is being consumed per day?
• Is the system being starved of water?