V.DIG.2022 - Farmo sensors trial to improve efficiency, safety and quality at Romani Pastoral Co

Summary

The project has sought to improve workplace safety, animal welfare, efficiency and profitability on farms through the use of technology.

Checking stock waters is a time consuming and inefficient activity on most farms. The consequences of undetected or late-detected water supply issues can have a major negative effect.
Farmo sensor devices have been installed on both Windy and Warrah Stations. Low power, long range communication modules are used to transmit data collected in the field to a cloud-based server for analytics and final presentation on the end user dashboard.

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:

1.10 Water trough sensors
2.5 Water tank sensors
3.5 Gate and door sensors
4.2 Rain gauges; and
5.2 Water flow monitoring sensors;
Will have trained and acquired sign-off from Romani Pastoral Company’s General Manager and MLA.

Key findings

Digital Technology has the capability to provide real time and long term data sets for primary producers.
• Data can be collected from remote sensors spread across large properties communicating under battery power. Individual devices can collect a wide range of environmental and situational data dependant on the sensor design.
• Data can be sent via LoRaWAN as used in this project, or alternatively Cellular Narrow band and Satellite options are also available. LoRaWAN used in this project relies on gateways acting as a kind of repeater station, providing line of sight coverage across an area up to 10km in radius.
• The end user can access the data in visible form via a dashboard where an internet connection is available.

Benefits to industry

Digital ag-tech 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

Farmo believes there are opportunities for further R&D into sensors and IoT devices that address user cases and pain points experienced by primary producers. While battery and communication technologies are improving quickly, the practical device applications are not so the benefits to the red meat industry may be delayed by years and sometimes decades.

Digital technology and IoT is about the benefits that can be derived from interconnectivity across a network. In the red meat industry, the lack of an industry wide smart tag is a barrier to including the animals in the IoT network. Farmo believes the use of low frequency ear tags for the NLIS scheme is preventing the advancement of technology in this area.