Case studies

Hi, my name is Rachel Hay, I'm the knowledge broker from tropical North Queensland Drought Hub.

Through land management practices we're looking at trying to create a more resilient agriculture industry. So that means I share the knowledge from what we learn from farmers and producers with the communities that we have within our hub footprint.

It's really important for regions to be connected through the internet. It allows producers and farmers to have access to the things that can help us become more prepared for drought and more resilient.

At Burlington we've put in a low earth orbit satellite trial. I think having the low earth orbit satellites- the ‘Leos’, allows them to have better access to connectivity options than they have previously.

My name is Mark Williams. I moved here year and a bit ago now.

We run about 3,000 breeders here, and send all of our weaners down to Dunluce.

Some of the problems have had is having people come here and all loading up onto the one system and then slowing it right down.

And when someone really needed it to organise trucks, you'd have to walk around and kick people off using the wifi just so they could organise stuff or make wifi phone calls. So it makes it difficult to get things done in the office if you have no connection or no phone service.

I got a phone call from the owner of Burlington asking about the Leos and if they would work in this area. They had their phone lines down for about 3 months over the wet season which made it very difficult for them to have any sort of connectivity in this area.

I bought one of the Leo dishes out for them to trial. It was very easy to set up. It's a very straightforward process, almost most plug and play.

And it's providing more reliable connectivity they have been able to communicate every day, and use a lot of AgTech with downloading uploading and the speeds have been very reliable.

My experience using the Leo so far has been really good. You’ve got that speed. It’s so quick, it just makes it a lot easier.

We use a lot of solar pumps on the farm that make it a lot easier than having petrol pumps or anything like that.

We have monitoring water systems and electric rain gauges, because over the wet season we can't get to places, so you’ve got to be able to see that everything's still good and you can do that all by computer it just makes everything a lot simpler with ordering and organising stuff.

It's a lot better than the old system that we were using.

My advice would be to do your research. Connectivity has gotten better and better, as time goes by and not every option suits each business so have a look around and try and find the devices that would suit your business.

My name is Matt, I'm the IT manager of DA Hall & Co, which is primarily an egg producing company. We have multiple sites spread across the Millmerran region.

Just because we're so remote and rural, we have a lot of issues with coverage, cell coverage, internet coverage, any kind of communication coverage, to be able to access things like AI, big data. And then we cross things like safety.

We cross things like our overall data aggregation, and just ease of being able to manage what's actually going on on these farms. After having all the connectivity issues here on site, we've reached out to the AgTech and Logistics Hub to see where we can go, and what solutions we're able to be provided.

G'day, my name is Owen Williams, I'm from the AgTech and Logistics Hub. I'm the general manager here. The AgTech and Logistics Hub was set up to work with the industry which combines farmers producers and agribusiness. With that, we work closely with them to look at what their deep challenges are. Once we work with a farmer, and we understand their challenge, we go back to this cluster of innovators. The innovators will then work through what the problem is, looking at mapping right through to how it's going to be deployed, and how it's going to be used. From there, they'll put their solutions forward and we'll work out what the best choice is agnostically for the farmer. Once we have that, we work with the farmer to work through what the best solution will be for them and then we deploy that solution in digital connection.

My name is Joe Prelc, I'm the managing director of Internet Innovations. Internet Innovations is a specialist digital connectivity provider. We were introduced as DA Hall have had issues in these locations for many years. We adopted a collaborative approach; we engaged with DA Hall. We went through a discovery phase where they shared their Google pins for all their locations required digital connectivity. The location that we surveyed there's robotic machinery stacking eggs. In that location, there is no mobile coverage. We assessed the location for two solutions. We provide improved mobile coverage we also provide high availability, high reliability 4G connectivity. We then turned-on site, installed, and then reconfirmed that that met their needs. The positive impact of digital connectivity- it improves social, health and safety, and makes your business more efficient.

With the digital connectivity solution that we now have, we've got communication into all the sheds, so we can see what's going on- all the telemetry, all the egg data that's coming over the lines and into the conveyors, we're able to promote better bird health and better productivity out by having real-time data and visualisation available to us 24 hours a day.

What advice would I give to a farmer that's looking to really deploy AgTech? Is to probably truly understand what AgTech they are truly looking at. To understand the AgTech you need to understand what the actual outputs are, that you're looking for- whether it be through labour savings, whether it be through big data, or whether it be just through trying to give you a small chunk of data that allows you to make better decisions. From there, you'll be able to make your own choice and deploy what you need for your digital connection at your property.

I'm Stuart Neuendorf.

We run a family farm. I farm in conjunction with my brother Garth. We have 300 acres here, 200 acres of fully irrigated cropping country, and a piggery, and we're a third-generation farmer.

As you probably know farming is a very complicated business to run, we have many aspects of our business that need analysing. And as you get busier time is very important to you, so AgTech was giving us some real-time data, to what we need, to have more informed decisions to make going forward.

Hi, I'm Andrew Chamberlain I'm with Queensland Farmers' Federation or QFF.

The technology we've installed on this farm in the Fassifern Valley here is a range of sensors that are all connected up via a low power wide area network, that allow the farm to see in real-time information from soil moisture to water quality, to the status of gates opening and closing, and how full silos are with grain, so that the farmer can see all of that information on a single screen.

Yeah the positive impact of the AgTech is probably the immediate one was one of the weather stations where we picked up wind direction, we picked up the best time to spray so we don't get spray drift onto neighbours, and then as we got more graphs and more data we could make some more informed decisions about energy consumption, like currently we're probably looking at replacing some fans in our piggery.

Because they're quite old so now we have some actual graphs and some informed data we know that we can probably spend the money on the more expensive fan and get a payback period.

Obviously, it's very convenient. You can come in any time of the day and just check where some of the energy consumption is and with the weather station, you know just to get on that every morning to see where the weather is to make informed decisions of if we need to spray, or what time we can spray or irrigate.

Technologies like these take a commitment to implement, so you've got to learn a new area of farm management.

It takes a bit of time to get to know and understand new technologies, but once you get to understand the information that's available, and how it can be used, there is some great opportunities there to use these systems for improved productivity, and time saving and all sorts of other on-farm benefits.

Probably advice for anybody looking at AgTech would be, it does take a little bit to set it up, and then you have to have a little bit of time to analyse it.

But if you're sitting on the fence, I think you know the way agriculture is going at the moment you just have to get into these sort of things because if you don't start to adopt some technology you'll get left behind. Farming's just totally different game than it was 10 years ago.

I'm Kym Harrison.

I own and run Oakwood Dairy here with Torie Harrison my daughter.

It's a 245 acre farm that's pasture based, in the beautiful Mount Kilcoy Valley, Southeast Queensland.

So we've been farming here for 20 plus years, and we're up to a herd average of about 250 cows milking. In the 20 years that we have been farming here we've adopted a lot of new AgTech. And our latest one is our collar monitoring program for our cows.

We've installed over 300 collars here at the dairy, and it's a device that is worn around the cow's neck like a pedometer.

It measures how much they walk, and how much time they spend eating each day.

So it captures the data on the cow 24/7, and as they come back to the dairy it feeds into the aerial that can read up to 500 metres away, and analysing that data it can indicate how healthy they are, and whether they're in oestrus for breeding.

To previously having the collars, we used to have to manually just check on the herd. We would go out and check to see how the health was, how the reproduction was.

And then after implementing the collars it just picks it up so much quicker and so much easier.

We can see the cows are becoming ill and then we can treat them before they become really ill, and just all-over general health keeps our cows’ healthy happy cows so they produce good clean milk for us, good quality milk.

This technology has improved our timing of artificial insemination for the cows. It's saved us time in staff training as well, it's a lot easier for them to look at the computer or the app on the phone and know that green's good to go and red's no go.

We've been adopting technology here for the farm the entire 20 years that we've owned it, and it's always about improving efficiency minimizing workloads and increasing productivity. I've got to stay on top of the ball and keep the farm producing.

My name is Letisha Johnson, I'm a Project Officer for EastAUSmilk.

We’re an advocacy body for dairy in Queensland and New South Wales. I think adopting AgTech is really important for the dairy industry, obviously everything's moving forward in that area, and I think we need to keep up with the times on it.

Adopting AgTech here on the farm has helped the younger generations get involved, whether it's in the irrigation, feeding the cows, monitoring their health and behaviour. It's been super positive, and we look to do more in the future.

Rod Dalton, Grantham Orchards in South East Queensland.

We've been growing persimmons on the orchard for in excess of 20 years. One of the challenges is as a small grower in an area that doesn't grow much in the way of persimmons, our sources of information are very limited.

We have to rely most of the time on the feedback we get from the marketplace. That's where the Persimmon Weekly Market Report has pulled all that information together and has been very useful.

The Persimmon Weekly Market Report has been an essential business tool for Australian persimmon growers.

It feeds back that market intelligence to the growers so that they can then make on-farm decisions about how they'll manage the crop but also how they'll go about marketing it, which markets they might supply to, and which size fruit they'll put into different markets.

The Queensland Government grant that we received from the agribusiness solutions project, has allowed me to work closely with growers and help them adopt technology.

Not only the weekly market report and using the online web-based app to enter their data, but also to become more familiar with using tools like Zoom and Teams. I was able to work one-on-one with growers to actually improve their confidence in using digital technology.

Having access to a market report where that sales information from a number of growers is accumulated and averaged without identifying who those growers are, I found was very advantageous.

So, for people in the agricultural industry who haven't had who are on the fence or indecisive about taking on AgTech, anything to do with AgTech really is a very positive thing as far as I'm concerned.

I mean more technology, just basically time saving, money saving, people saving. I mean these days labour amongst many other things is getting tighter and harder to source.

The more technology we can use to save, to save the better.

So, one of the things that the weekly market report has helped is it's boosted all of our confidence to have a go with AgTech and to actually improve the technology that we're using and tailor it to our needs.

And I think that's been absolutely critical, is it's now a system that is tailored to the persimmon industry.

My name is Scott Kirkwood.

I'm a third-generation ginger farmer here in the South Kolan District of Bundaberg. We farm roughly 200 hectares, mainly undulating country, which makes connectivity a real problem.

When we first really looked at it, I was discussing connectivity issues with Bundaberg Fruit and Vegetable Growers. I wasn't aware what was out there, until BFVG gave me the recommendations.

My name is Bree Watson. I'm the CEO of Bundaberg Fruit and Vegetable Growers.

We're the regional representative organisation for fruit, vegetable, herb and nut farmers in the Wide Bay Burnett.

So with the help of the Queensland Government and the DAF agribusiness solution grants, it allowed us to work really closely with a number of growers, to sit down, do a needs analysis of their business, and then go out and find some tech solutions that would help meet some of those gaps that we had identified.

The connectivity issues we were having on the farm, mainly was not getting data through in time to make those pivotal decisions.

So with the help of the low orbit satellite, we have a lot faster internet.

We also implemented security cameras, and with that, we've found we can make sure the biosecurity there's no people entering the farm that could possibly bring something in.

Also we've implemented some more soil moisture probes and a sat-flow meter. Just to see what the trees are doing, just to have more real-time data.

In addition to those technologies. we were able to look at and implement a barcode scanner.

So barcode scanners can really help with a range of different activities from product traceability, through to managing you know, what's in your chemical sheds.

But most importantly you can also be used for biosecurity and quality assurance measures as well.

So when it comes to AgTech, you know, it's not just about implementing gadgets on-farm. It's really about empowering growers with knowledge and data, to then help them make data driven decisions.

So as we've seen on Scott's farm, by increasing his knowledge and the information that he has access to, he's then able to make small changes on his farm, which will have really big impacts down the line.

My advice with AgTech is just pick up small amounts and just get moving with it. Even connectivity is a big thing. Between that and then probes, tying this all together has made a real difference within my business.