Getting ahead by farming SMART

If you’re keeping an eye on emerging technology in agriculture, a good place to look would be Armidale, in the New South Wales Northern Tablelands. Here, the University of New England’s SMART Farm is applying cutting edge technology to agriculture.

The SMART (Sustainable, Manageable, Accessible Rural Technologies) Farm is a commercial farm and a research station on a 2,900 hectare property just outside Armidale. Predominantly a grazing operation, the farm supports a flock of roughly 7,000 sheep and a small number of cattle. A farm manager and livestock manager are the only full-time employees, supported by two part-time technicians and an array of casuals and shearing and fencing contractors.

The farm fulfils a double role, its research equally of interest to the agricultural industry and the university sector. Overseen by Professor David Lamb – the head of the UNE’s Precision Agriculture Research Group – the SMART Farm exists to introduce, develop and test farm technology that will benefit the industry. At the same time, it is being used to educate farmers and agribusiness professionals of the future to use and develop cutting edge technology.

Key to this is the $2 million SMART Farm Innovation Centre, which opened in March 2015 and operates as a technological and educational hub for UNE. Up to 200 students a year pass through the centre, and not just those studying agriculture: students from science, mathematics, business and education degrees are visiting the centre to learn about the technology being used.

First and foremost, the UNE SMART Farm is about research and education,” says David. “Research gives rise to education, education gives rise to interest and adoption and guides research. That’s why the Innovation Centre has been such a critical addition to our capability on the farm; we can now properly run a shopfront for our vision.”

Despite the research and education focus, the SMART Farm definitely still operates as a commercial farm – to do otherwise would jeopardise the practicality of the research. The lambs and cattle produced are sold to abattoirs and local saleyards, while the wool is sold through the Sydney wool markets.

It’s a real living and breathing farm with all the same problems that farmers have,” says David. “We try not to get in the way of the farming, because it’s got to be a real farm. But the beauty of it is we get wonderful feedback and wonderful performance metrics that are real-world based.”

CONNECTING THE SCIENCE

David’s academic background is in physics, which he says naturally led him to precision agriculture.

I came to UNE to run a physics department, because I knew damn well that it had a perfect connection with things like farming, and with UNE’s international reputation in agriculture and environmental science, and its extensive land holdings, it was my chance to get physics up and outdoors.”

With the Precision Agriculture Research Group well established, the launch of the National Broadband Network (NBN) in 2009 allowed UNE to convert its existing property – the Kirby-Newholme farm ten kilometres outside Armidale – into a fully connected SMART Farm.

“We’ve been doing research in precision agriculture for a number of years,” says Doctor Mark Trotter, senior lecturer in the School of Environment and Science at UNE.

One of the key things that we thought was missing was a place to actually pull all the stuff together and try and bring different technologies to bear in the one spot and look for synergies between the technologies. That was the start of the SMART Farm.”

And while precision agriculture as a discipline has been used extensively in the grains industry for at least two decades, David saw an opportunity to apply the same theories to cattle and sheep farming.

Precision agriculture has its heritage in the grains industry,” he says. “But we’re heading towards the point where there’ll be a similar awakening of the benefits of ‘spatially-enabled farming’ in the livestock industry.”

CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY

The technology being tested and developed at the UNE SMART Farm is all chosen with the needs of the agricultural industry in mind.

“We’re not pure basic researchers,” says Mark. “We go to industry and say, ‘right, what are the problems?’ and then look for the solutions to those problems.”

Technology currently being evaluated on the SMART Farm includes:

• Livestock Tracking – GPS collars and Radio Beacon Triangulation (RBT) are used to track animals as they move around the farm. This builds on the existing National Livestock Identification Scheme (NLIS) and not only tracks an animal’s physical location, but also detects when they suffer from stress, such as a lack of feed or a dog attack.

“Ultimately you end up with a system that can detect when an animal’s in trouble or a disease state starting to come on,” says Mark. “There’s enormous value in that to the industry, not just in terms of increasing productivity, but also in terms of social licence to farm. We need to up our game in terms of welfare standards and being accountable and having objective systems to measure that.”

• Auto Drafting – Using a Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID), or smart tag, on livestock to automatically weigh and draft sheep. According to farm manager Paul Arnott, the auto drafting system used provides huge savings. “It saves us probably two-thirds of our labour requirements. It’s massive in terms of efficiency.”

• Pastures and Space – Using satellite imagery, active optical sensors and laser sensors to understand pasture growth rates and biomass in paddocks. This helps not only inform stock rotations and stocking rates, but also protects pastures from environmental damage. “There’s massive value in that in terms of dollar returns in the industry around increasing stocking rates,” says Mark.

• Soil Probes and Sensor Clusters – An extensive soil moisture network of 100 probes – as well as clusters of plant and soil sensors that are capable of monitoring and modelling plant growth – support research into new pasture and crop monitoring and management tools. All of the data can be accessed remotely using the farm-wide telemetry network.

• Drones – The SMART Farm currently uses two drones, a large one for carrying heavy gear over trial sites and a smaller one for scouting and imaging. Three-dimensional imaging of trees and pastures for quantifying biomass and carbon storage, and of cattle for live-weight estimation are all examples of the sorts of innovations under investigation on the farm. According to David, legislation is the biggest challenge affecting what can be done with a drone. Currently, drones can’t be flown out of sight, can’t reach a height greater than 400 feet (123 metres) above ground, and can’t be operated via camera alone. Safety is paramount so any innovative tools need to be compatible with operating constraints.

• Virtual Fence – The SMART Farm team is working on technology that could potentially control the movement of animals via a virtual fence. However this technology is in its infancy, as researchers are still grappling with the problem of animals associating the shock they receive when crossing a virtual fence with an unrelated physical object such as a tree or rock.

TRANSLATING THE TECHNOLOGY

The huge amounts of data all these technologies create is undoubtedly valuable, but is also one of the biggest problems David and the UNE team are tackling. While all this connected data helps turn the SMART Farm into what David calls “the ultimate Internet of Things”, it can be information overload for the users.

We’ve been working on precision agriculture, but what we have created is a need for ‘decision agriculture’,” David says. “What tools have we got that can render all this enormous amount of information you can potentially generate down to single decision points? Decision agriculture comprises getting computers to think more like farmers and making sure farmers understand the agronomy that flies back to them.”

The challenge for the SMART farm team is converting these swathes of data into a simple tool that can guide a farmer’s methods.

There have been a lot of technologies that have gone to market, and they’re just too complicated,” says Mark. “You really need to think about how can these technologies be readily applied or used by the average farmer.”

If rendered down to a simple SMS recommendation, the farmer can pull it out of their pocket, look at it and go, ‘yes, that’s alright’, or ‘no, ignore it’, put it back in their pocket and move on,” says David. “But now, they knock off and they’ve got enormous amounts of data to trawl through. At the end of a long hard day sitting on the tractor and fencing, farmers have got to go back into their office and make sense of numbers, and they didn’t do farming because they love math.”

VALUE TO THE AVERAGE FARMER

While all this technology might sound impressive in theory, how can it help the average farmer in Australia? “There’s no question that farmers have an unshakeable belief they can manage what they know, and if they know more, they have a better chance of managing things,” says David.

SMART farm manager Paul Arnott can see firsthand the improvements these technologies can make to his business. It all comes down to taking control of the measurements and using them to his advantage. “In a group of animals there might be $100 production difference between the best and the worst individual animal,” Paul says. “So if you can measure that and keep the better performing ones, your breeding program makes much faster gains.”

The technologies being used on the SMART Farm also help Paul cut down on labour inputs. For example, the auto drafting system means only one person is needed to do a job previously done by three or four, and the pastures and space program and sensor clusters mean he spends less time checking up on each paddock. “The less you have to do on foot or in a vehicle and the less time everything takes, the less labour you need to employ to get it done.”

And while some of the technology – such as the soil moisture probes – might currently be too expensive for most, it is only a matter of time until this isn’t the case. “So what we do is we watch and get involved in tech early, understanding that no farmer is going to be able to afford this now, but we know the price will come down,” says Mark.

That’s part of what the SMART Farm is,” agrees Paul. “It’s cutting edge, but they’re always looking for new tech to make it cheaper.”

TRAINING THE NEXT GENERATION

As all the new technology is cutting costs and improving efficiency, the educational side of the SMART Farm is helping to tackle the problem of engaging students in the industry. “One of the key challenges we’ve got in agriculture and food production systems is a lack of interest from the very brightest students in this sector,” says Mark. “And what we find when we open up some of these technologies to some of the very brightest students is that they are really engaged.”

With its Innovation Centre giving access to SMART Farm technology to UNE students from different disciplines, traditional views of agriculture are changing. “That’s the beauty of this,” says Mark. “We’ve got a whole range of problems we know we need solved, and we can bring together the agriculture specialists with the technology guys, the computational scientists, the physicists, the mathematicians and the statisticians, and they get a buzz out of applying their skills to a real world problem.”

And it’s not just university students benefitting. Mark recently took a group of Year 10 and 11 high school students around the farm, demonstrating the technology being used and how it translated back to the computer. “It was astounding to see their ability to take what they’d learnt in the field and apply that to analysing data,” says Mark. “All of a sudden they could see there was a lot more to agriculture – or there is going to be a lot more to agriculture – than just killing a weed.

So the overall ability of what we’re creating is to ultimately expose these very bright students to some of the challenges we’ve got in food production, hopefully capture those really bright minds and get them back in to become our industry leaders and research leaders in this space.”

ALL EYES ON THE FUTURE

David and his team hope the UNE SMART Farm can send a message of what is possible in agriculture with the use of technology. “Our farm is a sheep and beef farm – primarily sheep – but the message is the same for any farmer, be it dairy, cotton, wheat, rice, grape growing, whatever,” David says. “It’s about soils, it’s about the weather, it’s about optimising your production system and reducing your cost of inputs and targeting your quality.

“In ten years, I want SMART Farm to be one of 137,000 of its kind. I want every other farm to be connected just like the SMART Farm is – on good, reliable high-speed internet – because that’s what sets us apart. We want ourselves to be exemplars of this, but not some shining light that nobody else can be. Everybody can be like this if they’re connected.”

Getting ahead by farming SMART