KotahiNet chief executive Vikream Kumar tipped the usual pitch for farmers to adopt the IoT on its head to delegates at the MobileTech conference in Rotorua.
His company specialised in connecting businesses with sensors and wireless networks that enabled devices to communicate within businesses and beyond, including farms, orchards and processing operations.
“Connectivity is being pushed by technology companies but often still not thinking about solutions. Connectivity is not IoT, it just allows us to get data and do something useful about it.”
He cited an example of knowing how much milk was held in a silo on farm.
“It may be useful for the farmer to know how much is in there but to a wider group of people it may be valuable too. For example, knowing how much milk is to be collected is interesting to Fonterra to optimise collection of it.”
A similar monitor was proposed for a feed silo but the farmer said he was only marginally interested in knowing how much was in it.
“But knowing how much was in it was more important to the feed supplier. He could change his delivery model by knowing which customer needed delivery and could optimise the supply chain.”
Given the early stages the IoT evolution was at, he challenged companies to question whether they should be pushing solutions at this stage to farmers rather working with service providers who could see the benefit for their businesses.
IoT was poised on the cusp of becoming more integrated into farm businesses, whether for farmers or service company benefit, thanks to developments in connection networks.
“What has been missing is the ability to transmit small volumes of data over long distances with low power/battery use.
“Low power wide area networks were proving well suited to allow long battery life sensors to talk, hooking into wifi and Bluetooth to deliver coverage over 30km, making it ideal for extensive orchard and pastoral properties.
“So often, we expect top-down connectivity with large telcos providing coverage, which is expensive and in a way makes us helpless until that coverage arrives. This does not have to be true for this sort of network and IoT.”
The network option was evolving quickly with routers employing it rolled out in China this month.
“In a couple of years you will have one of these put up on farms and orchards, empowering us to not to have to rely on large telcos to fix our connectivity problems.”
He did not see the systems competing with established, large-scale telcos but more sitting alongside, filling a gap determined by the low data volumes IoT usually required.
