Technology

AgriSmart was created by Australian Charles Morgan after he got stuck in New Zealand during the covid lockdown in 2020. The AgriSmart team.

A smart solution

By Samantha Tennent

A new software programme will enable farmers to manage their businesses and teams better, as well as meeting various rules and regulations easily.

After being stranded in New Zealand during the 2020 lockdown, Australian Charles Morgan and his partner decided to stay put and started looking for innovative software companies for potential work. He was keen on the agricultural sector and came across AgriSmart during his search.

“We were on our way to France when covid struck and changed our plans,” Morgan says.

“But I knew New Zealand had a strong primary sector driving its economy and I had been looking at global trends where I found a common theme between managing costs and increasing insights into ground-level business, as well as the growing interest in employee welfare.”

He has a background in software from previous roles in Australia and could see the potential software could offer to combine those elements from the global trends.

“I was keen to explore something technical that combines a few different aspects within a business,” he says.

“Things like payroll, finance, workforce management and health and safety, because it’s not just about paying staff correctly anymore – we need more information for the full management of employees.

“How do we manage their pay, their costs, their tasks, their health and safety, their welfare? And, it needs to be easy, managing in a single platform instead of being paper documents or a mixture of different logins.”

The AgriSmart concept made sense to him; it consolidates the different people management elements into one place, to help create clarity and drive efficiency for farmers. He also advocates for understanding the why behind things, particularly with more compliance hitting farmers.

“There’s a lot of frustrations around regulation and meeting compliance, but I think sometimes we need to remember it’s the consumers and supermarkets within the supply chain that are driving these global shifts – and it’s not just happening in New Zealand,” he says.

“Customers want a better understanding of who is supplying products and we need better systems and software to meet those requirements.”

He talks about utilising things we need for compliance, like timesheets, and how they could add further value to a business.

“Timesheets are created to pay people correctly, but when we combine them with a cost management system then people are tracking more than just labour costs, it helps them understand what is happening in the business,” he says.

“And it’s evolving from there; farmers need to think about what information they need to be collecting and managing and how they can empower their employees to collect the data for them.”

The AgriSmart system simplifies things for farmers. Rather than having six different tools to use, it is one platform to manage the employee workforce. And it is a simple solution for Fonterra suppliers to help satisfy their requirements within the Co-operative Difference, as Emily Eder has found.

“Some dairy farming friends had me worried that it was really hard to meet the people element within the Cooperative Difference,” Eder says.

“But when it came to it I realised everything was in AgriSmart.

“The questionnaire was asking if we could provide evidence for various things to do with our staff and I can prove everything from the system; there are heaps of reports I can print if I need to.”

Along with her husband Gerard, they sharemilk 1000 cows near Mangatainoka and have large numbers of staff to manage.

“A lot of our team are from the Philippines so it’s helped a lot with visa requirements,” she says.

“And although their English is reasonably good, they understand things better when they’re written down, so that’s been a huge benefit for us.

“We can add tasks and notes for our team (and) if they come back from days off it’s clear what they need to be doing.

“And if they finish a task early they can see what the rest of the team are doing and find someone to give a hand, which is great because our farm is so big you don’t always know where everyone is.”

She originally joined the programme after frustrations that no other software seemed suitable for the dairy sector.

“The average payroll system doesn’t cater for the uniqueness of dairy farming, we don’t work nine till five and rosters can be a bit all over the show,” she says.

But she raves about the suitability of AgriSmart and how much time it saves and keeps things simple. The team enters their own timesheet information, which shifts some of the responsibility from the employer to the employee and there are no excuses for health and safety as all the information is easily accessible.

“It keeps communication clear and open so there is no confusion,” she says.

“We had a complaint once about how a staff member was getting the cows in and since we had everything logged in the system, we could work out who it was and were able to have a discussion with them about it.”

She really appreciates the ease it creates for people management.

“We are really busy so tools like this are key to help us juggle everything,” she says. n

“There’s a lot of frustrations around regulation and meeting compliance, but I think sometimes we need to remember it’s the consumers and supermarkets within the supply chain that are driving these global shifts – and it’s not just happening in New Zealand.” Charles Morgan

Charles Morgan has developed AgriSmart, a new software programme that will make administration on farms easier. Charles, Briar and Daisy Morgan from AgriSmart.

Finding the right connection

By Tony Benny

Adopting technology in agriculture is not always easy as connectivity issues continue to be a problem.

The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) in world agriculture is being hampered by unreliable connectivity, according to a recently published report.

The “Industrial IoT in the time of Covid-19” report says 72% of agricultural organisations globally experience connectivity challenges when trialling IoT projects and 70% don’t feel that public or terrestrial networks are completely suitable for their IoT needs.

The research was carried out by Inmarsat, a multi-national satellite business, which previously reported a rapid increase in the adoption of IoT, with 80% of respondents to a 2021 survey saying they had employed an IoT device compared with only 26% three years earlier.

IoT’s been quietly spreading through New Zealand agriculture for years, one of the earliest adoptions being auto-steer tractors and now there are thousands of weather stations, soil moisture probes, animal tracking and robotic systems and the like beaming out data.

But Inmarsat director of Market Development Steven Tompkins says the latest findings reveal struggling to find the right kind of connectivity is a key barrier to successful agricultural IoT adoption. He suggests satellite services such as Inmarsat could solve that problem.

“Satellite is increasingly enabling farmers to adopt automated infrastructure, including water pumps, gates and grain storage temperature control, as well as the latest precision farming technologies, where consistent and reliable connectivity is fundamental,” Tompkins says.

And with hundreds of satellites being launched every year – Starlink alone now has 1500 orbiting Earth and plans to increase that to 42,000 – the reliable connectivity Tompkins aspires to, is becoming ever more accessible.

Though the new report doesn’t include any information specifically about NZ, connectivity is an issue for IoT developers here too. But satellites aren’t the only solution, Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) chairperson Mike Smith says.

He believes the connectivity needed for IoT in NZ could be provided by a groundbased network.

His organisation represents 37 independently operated networks that provide wireless broadband in areas not covered by the big telcos and he says that coverage could be harnessed to provide connectivity for IoT devices too.

A new company WISPA Networks has been formed with the intention of adding long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) services over the whole country.

“What we see as the future is we have a network of networks, 37 networks throughout the country who have coverage that covers more areas that mobile operators don’t get to where there is nothing else. The intent is an IoT broadband network that’s available throughout New Zealand,” Smith says.

He says WISPA has a rural focus and members have networks throughout NZ.

“Our coverage is humungous and we have local relationships and work nationally. Every one of our businesses has relationships with farmers. We’re building new infrastructure throughout New Zealand and an IoT network based on LoRaWAN long-range wide area networks that allows us to connect anyone,” he says.

“The intent is an IoT broadband network that’s available throughout New Zealand.

“WISPA’s already in 75,000 rural homes and businesses so we have a massive footprint and we want to take that to the next step.” n

Connectivity issues are stopping many farmers from adopting technology to use on the farm. Inmarsat director of Market Development Steven Tompkins says the latest findings reveal struggling to find the right kind of connectivity is a key barrier to successful agricultural IoT adoption.