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Harvesting smart technologies to tackle the global food shortage

Announcement posted by CSIRO Information Sciences 23 Jun 2013

New CSIRO research reveals productivity benefits for farming in the digital economy

From monitoring soil moisture to measuring oyster heartbeats, a new CSIRO report has revealed Aussie farmers can help to tackle the global food shortage and significantly increase their productivity by taking advantage of new smart farming technologies enabled by next generation broadband networks.

The Smart Farming: leveraging the impact of broadband and the digital economy report compiles research from a number of Australian first agricultural projects which indicate that by connecting farms to broadband-enabled sensor networks, farmers will be able to take more control of their operations by analysing the wealth of new information made available in easily accessible web tools.

“With food demand predicted to increase 50 per cent in the next 20 years[1], the main challenge facing the agricultural sector is not so much growing 70 per cent more food in 40 years, but making 70 per cent more food available on the plate[2]. To tackle this challenge and help farmers make better decisions, we’re trialling new broadband-enabled technologies such as cattle tags to track livestock as well as a range of sensor networks, which measure water salinity, soil moisture and even the heartbeat of oysters,” said Colin Griffith, Director of The Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation (ACBI).

“Initial studies indicate that these tools can help increase farming productivity in crop and pasture yields by targeting the use of water and fertilisers as well as in livestock production through better rotation of animals and pastures. For example, we have seen cotton growers using the soil moisture sensors almost doubling their yields per megalitre of water when they vary irrigation rates according to the localised needs of the soil and plants, rather than taking the one-size-fits-all approach for a whole field,” he said.

Hollie Baillieu, Chair National Farmers’ Federation 2050 Committee believes the digital economy presents a game changer for Australian agriculture.

“Not only will technology-driven productivity improvements help feed a growing population, but the innovations will also help improve farmers’ bottom line and led to more profitable farm businesses. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a cattle grazier from the Northern Territory or an oyster farmer in Tasmania, the benefits of emerging technologies provide opportunities for the entire farming sector,” she said.

The Smart Farming: leveraging the impact of broadband and the digital economy report will be officially launched to industry and government stakeholders during the Digital Rural Futures Conference on 26th June 2013.

For more information on the report or CSIRO’s Smart Farming projects visit CSIRO.au

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Editor’s notes

About ACBI:

The Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation (ACBI) provides unique opportunities to create innovative broadband-enabled services demonstrate their use in real world situations and evaluate their potential commercial and social value. Supported by CSIRO in partnership with National ICT Australia (NICTA), Australia’s two leading Information and Communications Technology (ICT) research organisations, ACBI is a collaborative national research initiative which connects people and business to the benefits of game-changing services and applications enabled by next generation broadband technologies. ACBI’s Foundation funding was provided by the NSW Government with matching resources from CSIRO and NICTA.  More recently, the Tasmanian Government has become a partner and ACBI is in the process of extending this support with other Australian governments.

About CSIRO:
CSIRO is Australia’s national science agency and has been pushing the edge of what’s possible for more than 85 years. Today, the organisation has close to 6,500 people working out of 58 centres in Australia and internationally. These people work closely with industry and communities to leave a lasting legacy across five broad areas: food, health and life science industries; energy; environment; information and communications; and manufacturing, materials and minerals.

About the Smart Farming: leveraging the impact of broadband and the digital economy report:

The Smart Farming: leveraging the impact of broadband and the digital economy report is designed to help government agencies, IT professionals, farmers and related businesses to better understand the potential of smart farming technologies in Australia’s agricultural and upstream service and processing industries. It describes opportunities and benefits for Australia’s rural sector from the broadband network and the digital economy. Some of these emerging opportunities have been explored through demonstration smart farm initiatives, outlined in the report. These projects have also pinpointed the key drivers and barriers for adoption of this new technology in the agricultural and related industries.

About the Kirby Smart Farm:

CSIRO and the University of New England have set up a demonstration Smart Farm in Armidale, NSW to investigate and demonstrate the impact of broadband and related digital services for Australia’s rural sector.  The initiative is lead by the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation (ACBI), a collaborative research initiative established by CSIRO, and UNE’s Precision Agriculture Research Group. The Kirby Smart Farm is a 2800 hectare working commercial farm located 10 kilometres north-west of UNE’s campus at Armidale.  The farm focuses on merino wool and beef cattle but various grains for livestock feed are also produced. At Kirby it is a mixture of native grasses, introduced clovers and developed rye-grass and fescue-based mixtures. Productivity on a farm of this kind is highly dependent on pasture management because it provides the main food source for the livestock.

The farm was also one of the first mainland farms connected to the NBN terrestrial wireless broadband service (initially at 12 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream with a planned future upgrade to 25 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream).

http://www.une.edu.au/smart/

About Queensland Digital Homestead:

Through CSIRO’s Sustainable Agriculture Flagship a ‘Digital Homestead’ in Townsville, Queensland, is being developed to integrate multiple disparate sources of information from on-farm sensing of soil [delete s], vegetation, livestock and the environment as well as from external sources such as climate forecasts and market information into a simple and usable cloud-based decision support systems for farmers and agriculture advisers. The project collaborators include QLD DAFF, JCU & QUT, co-funded by QLD Govt Smart Futures fund.

The project focus is on building a ‘dashboard’ that integrates and presents the information in such a way, so that better (more informed, accurate and/or more timely) decisions can be made. The additional opportunity is to build new and adapted businesses in the service sector, and across the value chain, that can be delivered virtually, taking advantage of the two-way real-time connectivity of the system.

About Sense-T:

Based in Tasmania, Sense-T is building the world's first economy-wide intelligent sensor network. It is creating a digital view of the entire island by combining different data sources, including real-time sensor data. Information will be available through easy-to-use apps to help businesses, governments and communities better manage their resources - to help them do more with less.

Sense-T is a partnership program between the University of Tasmania, the Tasmanian Government, CSIRO (through the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation) and IBM. It is also funded by the Australian Government through the Tasmanian Forests Intergovernmental Agreement. Sense-T establishes Tasmania as a centre for technology and research excellence, where shared data drives new approaches to social, environmental and economic sustainability that can be scaled cost-effectively elsewhere.

http://www.sense-t.org.au/

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Contact

Daniel Chamberlain, Communication Advisor, CSIRO Information Sciences

M: +61 477 708 849

PH: +61 2 9372 4491

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[1] National Food Plan:  Our Food Future, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Canberra. Australian Government, 2013. http://www.daff.gov.au/nationalfoodplan/white-paper

[2] United Nations, Food Security, 2012 http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/food_security.shtml