GROUNDBREAKING collaboration by the Primary Industries Department, global technology giant Cisco and Molong farmer Ben Watts has delivered a farming communications platform without reliance on Australia’s telecos.
Cameras monitoring paddocks, sensors delivering hourly packets of information from remote locations and mobile weighing stations are just some of the applications already operating on Waidup Homestead, Molong.
The Orange Agricultural Institute, a DPI research headquarters, is also running the platform, but the gear was made farm tough on Mr Watts property.
“We broke a lot of stuff,” said Mr Watts.
Cisco Australia’s technology chief Kevin Bloch said farm connectivity was solved, and the platform would remain open to other frontline technology companies to begin developing more applications for it.
In explaining how the platform worked, Mr Bloch compared it with a smart phone.
“A smart phone, yes you can make phone calls on it, but the apps available for it make it much more useful,” he said. The platform makes use of low power, wide area networking (LoRa) technology, that has sensors transferring information even when broadband or mobile phone coverage is poor.
Using drones to gather pasture information, climate stations, soil moisture probes and remote walk-over weighing gives real-time access to fundamental on-farm data.
DPI deputy director general (Agriculture) Michael Bullen said the entire point of the platform was to increase farm profitability by enabling farmers to make better-informed decisions faster.
Mr Watts said the cost of sensors was rapidly decreasing. Pointing to a “redundant” sensor on his property, he said it had cost $3000 three years ago and the latest version had cost $200 and had greater capabilities.
“All it (the retired sensor) did was monitor that trough,” he said, pointing to a small trough a metre from the sensor. Earlier this week Mr Watts delighted in having Cisco’s Mr Bloch video conference with US colleagues in the same paddock. Mr Bullen said the system would now be rolled out across all of DPI’s 14 research farms, covering 13,000 hectares of the state and every climatic region.
DPI will also bring in other companies exploiting LoRa’s potential, Narrowband Network Co and Discovery Ag, expanding the partnership between government and private companies.
Highlighting the advantages of such collaboration Mr Watts said the equipment monitoring his farm was now in its third lifecycle – in just seven months.
