P.PSH.1179 - Making Real Farms Smart - Mixed Sheep Ag Tech

Summary

The project has enabled a Western Australian Mixed Sheep enterprise and Origo to develop, implement and assess an autonomous on-farm connectivity and IoT farming operation support system that provides high-speed on-farm services not dependent on the Internet. The project aims to quantify both the social and economic benefits of the well-planned use of IoT technologies and allow broad extension and evaluation by other producers.

As seen from the Producer, Kunmallup Pastoral, they report that the project has been a success. This is both seen from an operational, sustainable, social and profitability perspective. Origo can also report that it has contributed to understanding of producer requirements and implementation in extensive livestock producer operations.

Objectives

The project consisted of 5 phases to achieve its key objective of quantifying both the social and economic benefits of the well-planned use of IoT technologies and allow broad extension and evaluation by other producers.
- Phase 1: A livestock enterprise selected on specific criteria.
- Phase 2: Map producers current workflow and costs and identify improvement to workflow that can be achieved by integrating connectivity and IoT devices.
- Phase 3: Install and trialing connectivity solutions to power IoT Devices.
- Phase 4: Install IoT devices to achieve benefit determined in phase 2.
- Phase 5: Reporting and monitoring for duration of project based on agreed criteria.

Key findings

Kunmallup reports that the project has been a success, as it provides management of its critical water resources, and not just monitoring. Secondly, the provision of hyper-local weather that is critical for both pasture management and it grains production.
• The farming system, Financial Benefits and Smart Farming Methods - Impact on farming practices and business
• A total of 63% uplift in efficiency to Water Management when implementing Automation.
• Further benefits in the use of high-resolution Weather - Climate Data
• Increased benefits of the Internet with performance comparative to semi-urban areas in Australia
• Profound benefits and implications on social life.

Benefits to industry

• Foundational changes to the farming system in terms of ability to manage variation and limiting factors in the farming system.
• Automation resulted in an immediate uplift in efficiency.
• Access to Internet services, as we are taking for granted in urban areas, is foundational and critical to the Producer.
• Realising the journey and utilising learnings to constantly improve and achieve targets using technology as a tool in the farming system, not a "nice to have" or a gadget.
• The project indicates strongly that it enables Producers to achieve 'economy-of-scale'.
• It is strongly indicated that Bindi and Kunmallup are utilising an analytical and "Operations Centre" approach to monitor and control their water assets.
• Uptick in awareness, nationally and locally.

MLA action

The proven benefits of automated water monitoring have been disseminated to industry to help increase the adoption of this technology.

Future research

• The findings with regard to Internet Services provision and Mobile Internet and Mobile Voice services are crucial for producers as there are no other alternative to the current mobile services provider in regional and remote agricultural areas.
• It is important that the learnings and experiences from this project is utilised on a regional, state and national scale.
• To emphasise the journey from reactive and incident driven farming to an analytical and "Control Centre" approach.
• To utilise the learnings in this project for R&D in:
o The importance of automation and remote control in water management systems in livestock production.
o Importance of high-resolution weather observations in grazing systems.