Long-lasting sensors all over farms reporting data to a platform in the cloud accessible from mobile phones, tablets and computers will revolutionise farming, Spark Ventures says.
Monitoring anything that moves, or can be controlled remotely, was the promise of the Internet of Things (IoT), Spark Ventures manager Patrick Verryt explained at the National Agricultural Fieldays.
The ability to do this depended on several varieties of rugged wireless sensors that operated for seven to 10 years on a single small battery sending messages up to 30km on the Spark rural 4G network.
Potentially thousands of the sensors – produced by Nelson-based SenSys – could be used on a low-power wireless area network (LPWAN).
Verryt said the sensors gathered information on things such as motion, soil moisture and milk vat temperature and volume before the data was reconciled on ThingWorx, an IoT application platform for multiple devices and sensors.
ThingWorx was a platform developed by Blue Hill Research, in Boston, Massachusetts, that already had United States farming networks and management consultants as clients.
Spark Ventures only started on what it is calling the Connecting Farm project last December.
Within a year it hopes to have a service available to farmers and industry, taking a New Zealand Inc approach.
“Spark’s role is enabling the eco-system. The Connecting Farm solution uses various types of environmental and volumetric sensors including those that are buried in the ground and only send a few messages per hour, meaning they can run on coin-cell batteries for years,” Verryt said.
“The centralised system will visibly demonstrate how things around the farm are performing day-to-day, while monitoring environmental parameters and a number of other real-time information factors that are critical.
“We can offer farmers, rural communities, primary industry and agri-technology companies, and government agencies highly valuable real-time information insights into the future of the sector.”
First to trial the product, Waiuku dairy farmer Tony Walters said the goal of farm management was to drive profitability.
“We are focused on production yield, cost, and avoiding risk. Every farm faces unpredictability on a daily basis and I’m keen to adopt any type of low-cost technology that can help me collect vital data without having to do it myself.
“These new types of sensors are long-lasting, wireless and accurate and will radically change the quality of farm information as we know it today.
“With better access to precise data and less-intrusive monitoring I can make more informed decisions and prevent wastage, ultimately resulting in better profitability.”
SenSys offered controllers for carbon dioxide, water, photosynthesis, temperature, light, sound and other parameters.
“Our focus is modern internet-based controllers for primary industry – clever technology that brings real value to daily life and work,” SenSys principal Warwick Jones said.
“Every farm faces unpredictability on a daily basis and I’m keen to adopt any type of low-cost technology that can help me collect vital data without having to do it myself.”
Tony Walters
Waiuku dairy farmer
Meanwhile, farm data inter-connectivity was the goal of a Primary Growth Partnership between the Government and primary industries, now in its second year.
Software contractor Rezare Systems, in Hamilton, said the project came in three parts: The Code of Practice for farm data, the Data Standards, and the Data Linker tool.
Rezare’s managing director, Andrew Cooke, said at National Fieldays that NZ farms were a data-rich world and farm owners and their advisers loved to measure but were not yet good at interpreting the data.
“Farm data offers a huge opportunity for innovation but currently we have silos of information, unclear ownership, sharing without permission or inability to share.
“Meanwhile farmers themselves are repeatedly asked the same 20 questions, which they get sick of answering.”
Cooke said the introduction of futures markets overseas had raised the possibility some participants were using harvesting data in opposition to the best interests of cropping farmers.
The PGP project was aimed at encouraging innovation with farm data, providing transparency for all users, along with consistency and security.
Organisations would sign up to the code of practice so that farmers and other users understood who had rights, how data was processed and shared, and how it was secured and stored.
“It is a self-auditing approach to compliance, with an annual licence and use of the trademark after accreditation has been reviewed.”
The Data Standards were self-explanatory, to provide a common vocabulary of accepted meanings, formats and values, such as pasture covers expressed in kilograms of drymatter per hectare.
That would cut double entry, meaningless printing and duplicates, and therefore more efficient use of everyone’s time.
Finally, the Data Linker part enabled secure, standardised data transfers with farmers’ permission.
Data generators, like meat companies, produced figures that could be shared, like carcaseweights and grades. Other intending applications could register to receive that data on behalf of farmer clients.
Farm management programmes found such a stream of accurate data a very useful input to decision-making tools for farmers, Cooke said.
DairyNZ and Beef + Lamb NZ were joint owners of Data Linker, and were PGP partners with the Red Meat Profit Partnership, and the Government through the Ministry for Primary Industries.
More? Go to www.datalinker.org.nz.
