P.PSH.1286 - Accelerating the adoption of satellite assisted forage budgeting across northern beef businesses

Summary

The project aimed to achieve several ambitious objectives that would deliver significant benefits to both AACo and the broader industry. These included:
- refining the current pasture biomass and quality predictions
- developing methods for mapping and monitoring surface water
- the ability to automatically map land types
- implementing and validating new methods for land condition prediction
- improved understanding of priorities and barriers to ag-tech adoption.

This project has successfully achieved these objectives.

Objectives

The project aimed to achieve several ambitious objectives that if successful, would deliver significant benefits to both AACo and the broader industry. These included:
• Refining and improving the precision of current pasture biomass and quality prediction in complex landscapes.
• Developing methods for mapping and monitoring surface water to support grazing management and infrastructure planning.
• Improving understanding of land type variability, its role in decisions on long-term carrying capacity and the ability to automatically map land types.
• Implementing and validating new methods for a Land Condition Model that demonstrate the potential to scale the proposed image segmentation methods across the extensive grazing zone.
• Improved understanding of priorities and barriers to Agtech adoption.

Key findings

Using the Cibo Labs PastureKey service has transformed the forage budgeting and decision-making process for AACo:
• The “living model” approach to the national biomass prediction service is now well established within operational systems through the Australian Feedbase Monitor service to all livestock producers in Australia.
• Our ability to reliability estimate pasture biomass is only as good as:
- the time-series satellite imagery
- the data collected to train the models and our ability to adequately represent the pasture types and conditions important to grazing management decisions.
This has been extremely challenging to achieve with highly variable seasonal weather and pasture conditions since development began in 2018.
• The work to date has identified significant potential to improve estimates of pasture quality. Significant investment is now required to coordinate the collection of standardised pasture quality information to build the next generation pasture quality model.
• The Landscape Response Unit framework is a significant step forward that will underpin a range of developments associated with natural capital including sustainable grazing management, property development, carbon accounting and biodiversity assessments.
• The Landscape Response Units are already underpinning Cibo Labs initiatives related to land condition, land type mapping, landscape carbon estimation, biodiversity, and productivity assessments. There are significant opportunities for improvement which will require an investment of approximately $1M in computer processing to downscale from 100m to 10m resolution.
• The Landscape Response Units allowed us to extend the Qld Land Type mapping into the NT and northern WA at a higher resolution than the original mapping. We are now in a position to develop consistent land type mapping nationally.

Benefits to industry

• Increasing transparency and accountability in pasture and land condition management and improve visibility up the management chain on the status of the production asset base.
• Improve capacity to manage seasonal risk.
• Increased accuracy and precision in pasture measurement and management.
• Better herd production outcomes through optimizing pasture utilization and nutrition.
• Improved risk mitigation for long-term carrying capacity development.
• Improved paddock to nation reporting and benefits to Northern Breeding Business (NB2), CN30 and Australian Beef Sustainability Framework priorities.

MLA action

MLA will work with Cibo Labs to develop the next stage of investment to further validate and develop the technology. NABRC has signaled that land condition monitoring is the highest research investment priority in northern beef industry.

Future research

• The unprecedented and highly variable seasonal weather and pasture conditions across Australia over the last 5 years has made the development of a robust pasture biomass prediction capability highly challenging. The focus now must be to work closely with individual producers to identify regions, pasture types and seasonal conditions were model performance needs to be improved and to coordinate data collection.
• Significant investment is required to coordinate the collection of standardised pasture quality information to build the next generation pasture quality model.
• The Landscape Response Unit Framework should be downscaled from 100m resolution to 10m resolution, nationally. This would require an investment of $1M for data processing, additional project costs that could be shared across Agriculture Innovation Australia and Government partners.
• The ability to predict and map land condition is a game-changer. Significant site data exists across QLD, NT and WA. A coordinated data collation and analysis project should be initiated to provide the training data and capability for the developing a northern and southern rangelands land condition prediction change monitoring capability.
• The Australian Feedbase Monitor and Environmental Credentials for Grassfed Beef platforms could be leveraged to provide secure and trusted access to this information in partnership with producers.
• Access to digital farm mapping is still a fundamental barrier to ag-tech adoption across the industry. A national farm mapping service should be put in place to act as a single point of truth for the grazing industry.