Wireless tracking of cattle
Tracking cattle around a farm provides more advantages to farmers than just simply keeping a watch over their livestock. It can monitor an animal’s behaviour, eating patterns, health and wellbeing, helping to determine how to best cultivate the land to ensure cattle grow as strong as possible.
Lamb is using Taggle’s first generation ear tag tracking technology for cattle on the Kirby smart farm to determine where and when they are grazing the most.
“You can look at where the animal was during certain time windows of the day, and if those time windows were associated with grazing. If you subset all those logs down to 10am to 12pm and 2pm to 4pm in the day, those particular locations are likely to be where they were grazing, which means you can create a grazing history map,” he explains.
“By creating that map you can start to think about where they are taking majority of their biomass and if you need to put more nutrients out in the ground to promote more growth, or put in place a water point of feed supplements to improve the value of the pasture consumed during grazing.”
CSIRO’s Griffith says farmers can also be sent mobile device alerts when tracking technology picks up unusual movements of an animal such as drifting outside paddock boundaries, being still for a long period of time, or moving at remarkably fast speed. Each can indicate something unusual such as a death, attack or an animal is wandering lost or is being stolen.
“Going forward we are looking at potentially much more sensitive, more accurate sensors. So being able to diagnose animal behaviour such as a cow giving birth or if there’s some sort of incident that then can be sent as an alert to a farmer,” he adds.
“So rather than having to drive around the entire farm checking the cows are all right, being able to get alerts if something was to happen saves time.”
Robots
Robots are also making their way into precision agriculture. The head of Queensland University of Technology’s Farm Robotics project, Gordon Wyeth, is developing robotic weeding vehicles estimated to save the Australian wheat industry alone $620 million a year in herbicide and diesel costs.
The Australian Research Council funded project has seen development of a prototype called AgBot that sprays weeds along large fields autonomously while using software and a camera to differentiate from crops and avoid hitting into livestock, ditches and other obstacles.
“Because you have a very controlled method of herbicide delivery, you can use much less herbicide. Reducing the amount of herbicide that’s used has obvious cost and environmental advantages,” Wyeth says.
“Also, farmers spend a lot of money on diesel for tractors. These [robotic] vehicles are electric and one of the things we are working on is to make them solar powered, either using solar panels that might be situated somewhere on the farm where the vehicles go to recharge, or on the vehicle itself. So there’s no diesel costs, and no emissions.”
Wyeth adds robotic vehicles have been built to be much lighter than tractors or traditional crop harvesting machines, reducing soil compaction and preserving the existing soil quality. The on-board camera also captures data on crop conditions as it moves through the fields. This can help the farmer pick up on any growth abnormalities or if there is a pest problem, for example.
The University of Sydney’s professor of robotics and intelligent systems, Salah Sukkarieh, has also developed an advanced prototype of an unmanned aerial vehicle that can fly over a paddock and asses the health of crops, as well as map out weed coverage and water distribution.
Different types of sensors – such as vision, laser infared, thermal and multispectral – are attached onto the small robotic plane for capturing data such as the shape and size of a crop, the level of humidity, and so on.
Algorithms then churn all of the data into information that can be used to determine yield estimates, whether a particular part of the land needs more irrigation or fertiliser, or detect a disease outbreak early.
The NBN's role in farmingImplementing precision agriculture technologies is one thing but being able to interpret and use the data generated is another. This is where a high-speed Internet connection provided by the National Broadband Network (NBN) comes into play.
“A lot of the technologies we are testing and demonstrating out there are creating complicated data and information,” Lamb says. “That data and information is actually [moved] off the farm to people who understand it and know how to make it work. Then what we do is we connect the farm to those people through the NBN.
“Video telephony is the key here. If I were a farmer, I could have a service provider to look after all of that [information] and every week I’d sit down in my lounge room and have a video chat to them while they show me all the data that is coming off my farm. I could get a lot more sense in say half an hour with external help rather than spend hours a week trying to keep my own technology alive and working.”
NSW Farmers’ Eyre says the NBN is crucial to enabling farmers to tap into the expertise of technologists remotely, and sees more employment opportunities opening in regional Australia for people with IT backgrounds with have an understanding of the agribusiness industry.
“We have many farmers who have a lot of data sitting in their tractors, headers and so on that they are not using because they don’t have anyone to process it and they don’t have the time themselves,” he says.
“That’s where there’s a need for more training and a bit more collaboration across industry groups to get the digital economy really working in regional Australia. And our parties in the supply chain have to co-operate on things like data models; we need to collaborate in order to have effective IT systems across supply chains and agree on rules and processes.”
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.