Romani Digital Farm – Australian Digital Farm Program Roll out

Summary

Digital farms are important for the longevity of Australian red meat supply chains, whether it be to inform consumers of industry credentials or to improve business productivity.

MLA and partners have developed digital farm demonstration sites where technologies can be tested and ground-truthed for the Australian red meat industry. These sites also give industry stakeholders an opportunity to see digital agriculture in action.

This project is the second digital farm to be rolled out and will focus on installation requirements, producer user experience and quantifying the return on investment. Romani station will demonstrate technology that was not previously available during the first digital farm roll out at Carwoola.

Objectives

This project involves several different companies providing digital agriculture initiatives to create the Romani digital farm.

• Wildeye is providing cloud connected devices that help producers remotely monitor soil moisture, water flow, weather, reservoir levels, and pump station performance from a desktop, tablet or mobile device.
• FarmDeck will provide hardware products that allow producers to manage water, livestock and property surveillance by using sensors and a dashboard available through the use of the FarmDeck app.
• Goanna Ag has a fleet of hardware solutions that monitor soil, water, weather and inventory. The data collected from these sensors is directed to GoSat, a powerful platform that relays accuracy around irrigation scheduling, satellite imagery and benchmarking functionality, as well as yield forecasting.
• MAC systems are providing a suite of hardware solutions that allow producers to manage a variety of agricultural and farming activities, such as monitoring water and diesel fuel levels, pump automation and gate and door automation.
• Farmo has developed several sensors that require a small amount of power and use long range wifi, allowing the device to communicate with a gateway up to 10km away.
• WaterWatch will provide a solution to remotely monitor tanks, troughs, ponds, dams and irrigation schemes while having a low environmental impact.
• ICT International has a unique catalogue of digital sensors and data loggers that have been developed to measure key plant and soil parameters for the advancement of plant and soils research, to address physiological limitations to productivity.
• Farmbot Australia has a suite of hardware solutions that allow producers to manage water troughs and tanks.

AxisTech develops devices that power and control a variety of environmental multiuse sensors including water sensors, grain level sensors and gate and door sensors.

Benefits to industry

By focusing on the value of on-farm technology that enhances connectivity that enables data, demonstration farms such as Romani can be used to inform industry business plans, value propositions and return on investment tools that benefit the wider red meat industry.

Digital sensors are becoming more relevant to modern agriculture systems as the industry becomes more data centric. The data from a collection of sensors can enhance the efficiency, safety and quality of a farming enterprise. This is achieved by gaining greater control and insight of on-farm assets, allowing producers to make better management decisions in a shorter amount of time.