Goanna Ag’s low-cost sensors and connectivity to optimise water management across Romani Pastoral Co Windy station and significantly improve on-farm efficiencies
| Publication date: | 29 June 2022 |
| Project status: | Completed |
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Summary
Digital farms are important for the longevity of Australian red meat supply chains, whether that be to inform consumers of our credentials (CN30 and Beef Sustainability initiative) or to improve business productivity. This project is the second digital farm to be rolled out and will focus on installation requirements, farm user experience and quantifying the return on investment. This component partnered with Goanna Ag to install four LoRaWAN network gateways at Romani Pastoral Windy station to provide whole of farm connectivity. This connectivity was utilised for Goanna Ag’s own IoT sensor network that was installed at Windy station and also other third party IoT suppliers that participated in the Digital Farm and installed other IoT sensors.
Objectives
This project aimed to install four solar powered LoRaWAN networks at Romani Pastoral Windy station to provide whole of farm connectivity and utilise this to install a IoT sensor network to assist with monitoring of assets across the property. This included supplying, installing and making operational the following digital components:
1. 4 Solar powered, LoRaWAN base stations
2. 5 Water trough sensors;
3. 5 Water tank sensors;
4. 1 Diesel fuel tank sensors;
5. 5 Gate and door sensors;
6. 1 Asset tracker;
7. 1 Weather station;
8. 2 Rain gauges; and
9. 3 Soil probes
Will have trained and acquired sign-off from Carwoola Pastoral Company’s General Manager and MLA’s innovation and Events Coordinator.
Key findings
Goanna Ag deployed a LoRaWAN telecommunications network as well as a range of sensor solutions across Windy station. Overall, both the network and sensor solutions performed well. Third party sensor providers had varied results in connecting their solutions through a standardised telecommunication medium. Low powered sensor solutions can provide a number of benefits including labour efficiencies, risk mitigations and more informed decision making. Sensor solutions have some way to go to be seamlessly compatible over third party supplied network infrastructure.
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. This component assessed the suitability of a LoRaWAN network to simultaneously provide connectivity to a range of third party IoT sensors to reduce the number of competing network installations across a property thereby reducing costs and initial capital outlay.
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
Whilst IoT devices will bring significant value pre-farm gate, the maturity of the IoT eco-system and connectivity systems need further refining and agreement on a standard to ensure one type of network infrastructure can support a broad range of solution providers. The current approach for providers to supply their own network installation will make the technology either too complex or too expensive for most producers to engage with.
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For more information Contact Project Manager: John McGuren |
