Sorry, this video has expired
PRUE ADAMS, PRESENTER: One of the biggest challenges facing Australian food producers is mastering new digital technology.
According to a new report by the National Science Agency, Australian farmers have a wonderful opportunity to take advantage of the growing global demand for food.
And one of the keys to success will be the take-up of smart digital technology, enabled by the National Broadband Network.
But it remains to be seen how soon farmers get access to their new high-speed internet connections.
SEAN MURPHY, REPORTER: They look like normal Hereford cows ready for calving, but this herd is on the cutting edge of a new way of farming. They're on the Kirby SMART Farm, a 3,000-hectare sheep and cattle enterprise being run by the University of New England and the CSIRO.
DAVID LAMB, UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND: This is a livestock tracking ear tag which goes in the left ear of our animals. It sends out a time beep every few minutes and we have an array of antennae around the farm which picks up the signal and effectively triangulates and locates the animals.
SEAN MURPHY: So what sort of information is it providing?
DAVID LAMB: It's providing location only at this stage, but from that location information, not only can you tell where they are now, so you can go find them if you want to check them, there's a whole range of hidden smarts that go in behind that'll tell us about their behaviour and their grazing.
SEAN MURPHY: It's all about managing grazing rotations more efficiently and therefore more profitably, and also being aware of unexpected events.
DAVID LAMB: There's a whole range of opportunities around developing fingerprints of behaviour. For example, developing an alarm for when they're attacked by animals, if they happen to be stolen, if they're calving or if they're dead, obviously, but also even down to how much pasture have I got? By actually watching those dots moving around on the map, the animals tell you themselves.
SEAN MURPHY: The SMART Farm also has 100 soil moisture probes developed by the CSIRO, which create a living map of growing conditions.
DAVID LAMB: Now, soil moisture cuts across a whole range of operations on farm. Simple things like: can I work the soil? Should I sow? Should I apply fertiliser? Should I put animals on this paddock? How much moisture have I got? How much pasture growth have I got ahead of me? So, if you understand soil moisture, you can cut across a whole range of decisions.
SEAN MURPHY: Easy for David Lamb, perhaps; he's a professor of physics as well as being a farmer. But he says you don't need to be technical to benefit from precision agriculture. He says the National Broadband Network and the availability of high-speed internet connections will revolutionise farming.
DAVID LAMB: A lot of the technology that's being deployed on this farm can either be accessed directly on the internet, or if you're not interested in using the computer or the internet, we can use one of these standard video conferencing units that can double as your desktop screen and we'll have a conversation with our consultant in town. So what I'll do is I'll give Mark a call in town and we'll have a chat about the very data that's coming off our farm.
(Talking to computer screen on video conference) Hey, Mark. How are you?
MARK: Hey, Dave. Very good, thank you.
DAVID LAMB: Listen, I was just thinking we've got some stock to probably move out of that paddock 30. I was just curious to know how the pasture's tracking and what the best paddock is to move them to.
(End of video conference)
The information, raw data, can be streamed off farm, can be handled by other people out there who know what they're doing, know the software, and then the farmer can literally have a video conversation with them, a consult, every week, every few days back in the lounge room, hands-free. The consultant does the work; they just sit back and watch television and have a conversation.
SEAN MURPHY: It's one thing having a fast internet connection, quite another turning it into an on-farm asset.
Matthew Walsh manages the Peel River dairy at Woolomin, south of Tamworth in NSW. The farm has had fixed wireless broadband since last November, but so far it's made no difference to the productivity of its 100-odd milkers. Matthew Walsh is averaging up to 25 litres a day from each cow, but he's hoping eventually to have individual monitoring so that he knows which cows are the best producers, and importantly, how that relates to how much feed they eat.
MATHEW WALSH, PEEL RIVER DAIRY: That'd be great. At the moment we're not set up for that, but it is something that we can look into now. The technology is available.
SEAN MURPHY: Peel River is owned by Malcolm Rose, who invested in his own packing plant three years ago.
MALCOLM ROSE, PEEL RIVER DAIRY: We had quality milk, so we just built on that. The dairy industry is not real healthy at the moment, but by packaging your own, you can either go up or right out backwards. We sell it all in our local Tamworth, Gunnedah, Corindi, Armidale region, plus in Sydney.
SEAN MURPHY: And now that you're connected to the NBN, can you see further opportunities there?
MALCOLM ROSE: Oh, for sure. I mean, we've got to go with the times. You know, all the big stores these days, everything is done over the computer and done over the internet. I don't know a real lot about it, but I leave all that up to Janelle.
SEAN MURPHY: Janelle is Janelle Walsh, who co-manages the business with her husband, Matthew, as well as managing five children. Broadband has opened the world up for her kids and is already making her job easier.
JANELLE WALSH, PEEL RIVER DAIRY: The cloud-based accounting was just out of our reach. We couldn't use it; the connection was just not good enough, it was really inconsistent. So, we can do that now, which means it can synchronise with the office. It's interchangeable. I can do things from home, which I just couldn't do before, so it's made a huge difference to us.
SEAN MURPHY: And what sort of things are on the horizon for you, some new opportunities?
JANELLE WALSH: Well, we're kind of hoping to get a bit of an online presence because there is no online presence at the moment, so we're kind of hoping to have a website. I'm kind of leaning toward a bit of social media. I think that's a good way to reach people. Yes, that's what we're planning on doing.
SEAN MURPHY: At Garthowen, just south of the Moonbi Ranges in NSW, Andrew Gunn runs a Murray Grey stud with his wife, Sharon. Like many farmers, they don't have mobile phone coverage and struggled for years with an unreliable, slow internet connection. Now they're connected to the NBN's interim satellite service.
SHARON GUNN, MUNDALOLA STUD: Whenever I want it, it's there, it doesn't break down and that makes me very happy.
SEAN MURPHY: What sort of things is it enabling you to do?
SHARON GUNN: It's enabling me to get a lot of information about our Murray Grey breed group. It allows me to get stuff from the breed society. It allows me to pay accounts, like everybody else, do my banking - all that sort of thing that is very regular.
But in terms of running our business, it's very good, it's very good. It allows me - can I just do this? It allows me to download things like this that I wouldn't be able to do for us to have a look at. We're looking at purchasing some more cattle. And there they are. We can go away and have a look at those and sit down and study them, have a look at their breed plans and there it is.
SEAN MURPHY: Australian grain growers and irrigators are much further advanced in using digital technology such as global positioning satellite or GPS, which can collect data on yield, inputs and paddock history.
The National Farmers Federation says the key to more take-up will be education, keeping costs down and filling the big gap in the market in software and services to make the most of the information that can be gathered.
FIONA SIMSON, NSW FARMERS ASSOCIATION: We need to make sure that there are people in the supply chain that can actually work with farmers in terms of using that information, to utilise that information, to interpret and understand that information and feed it back to farmers so that we have a two-way relay. Currently there just aren't enough providers in that space to actually enable farmers to do things with the data that might be produced.
SEAN MURPHY: The recent Digital Futures Conference at the University of New England brought researchers, technology developers, business and government together to focus on how best to use broadband in rural Australia. And a major theme of the conference was that broadband technology would be key to Australia's national food plan goals to meet the predicted global food shortage.
We're all aware of the food production task, your 50 per cent extra by 2030, 70 per cent extra by 2070. But interestingly, according to the UN, we waste 30 per cent of what we produce. So it's not just about producing more, it's about being efficient and more intelligent in what we produce now and then optimising something like logistics and high-speed broadband is certainly going to play a big part in that.
SEAN MURPHY: Sensors measuring the heartbeat of oysters are just one example of the new technology now being developed to help farmers. The CSIRO is collaborating with the University of Tasmania, IBM and the Tasmanian Government on the world's first economy-wide sensor network. Oyster growers are using the Sense-T network to record real-time data on things like water temperature and salinity and can access instant information from other industries that may affect their business.
AMANDA CASTRAY, SENSE-T PROJECT MANAGER: The information that we're collecting, for example, on our dairy project in the north-west of Tasmania, that information from that same sensor talking about, you know, collecting data on soil moisture, can then be used by the regulator in the oyster leases to understand run-off and the amount of soil moisture and therefore what that impact might be on oysters. So it's about repurposing data and making that available to help people make better decisions.
COLIN GRIFFITH, CSIRO: Our farmers are getting older and older. They're finding it harder to attract new workers, so what we're hoping is the farmers don't have to work extra hard to lift productivity, but can work smarter, so it means less effort for more output.
DEREK SCHNEIDER, KIRBY SMART FARM: This sensor here will tell us the moisture and the soil type as we travel up and down collecting our data. We couple our EM38 with a GPS. The GPS positions us and also starts to collect the data, which is stored on board. And this is a Holland Scientific Crop Circle, an optical pasture sensor which we use to go along and essentially to ground-truth the satellite data that we're collecting.
The good thing about this is, as opposed to the hand-held unit, is we can spatially map our pasture throughout the field.
SEAN MURPHY: Precision agriculture may be a game changer, but it'll mean more than just smart technology in the paddock. The digital economy has the potential to revolutionise supply chains and the way farmers market their produce.
AMANDA CASTRAY: Farmers at the moment right across the country are under extreme stress from high input costs, from trying to actually turn a dollar, and it's quite a long supply chain. We see a lot of export opportunities for Asia and the rest of the world.
How fantastic would it be if farmers could actually cut out the middleman in some of those instances and deal direct with Asia, deal direct with the people who are purchasing their product overseas? And those opportunities now are really within our reach with some of these technologies.
SEAN MURPHY: Political debate about the National Broadband Network rollout has been dominated so far by the issues of download speeds and future-proofing of the different fibre optic cable services being promised by the Government and the Coalition.
The National Broadband Network is a big issue in the coming federal election and there's a real difference between what Labor and the Coalition are offering. But that's only for people who live in cities or towns big enough for underground cable. For the 7 per cent of premises in rural and remote areas, there's no difference between what the Government and the Opposition are offering.
DAVID KENNEDY, TELECOMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT: The policies that the Opposition and the Government have on that are virtually identical. The only small difference is that the Coalition will take a look at the possibility of upgrading that network to support wireless, mobile devices as well, not just fixed wireless. But apart from that, they are peas in a pod.
SEAN MURPHY: Communications consultant David Kennedy says up to 2 million Australians are travelling around the country at certain times and they won't have access to broadband.
DAVID KENNEDY: The Coalition is saying it'll take a look at upgrading the fixed wireless component - that's about 4 per cent of homes in the country - to support true mobile communications. But there isn't any guarantee that will happen.
This network has actually been designed and optimised to support fixed-location communications. Once you start introducing mobile devices into the mix - people coming into and out of cell areas - that could affect the performance of the fixed connections. So that's one of the things that the review will look at and see whether it's actually worthwhile to go down that track.
SEAN MURPHY: The multi-billion-dollar fibre optic cable rollout is behind schedule and NBN Co admits its rural and regional connections are also slower than expected. It's had problems getting planning approval for its fixed wireless towers and also discovered that they don't work in heavily wooded or hilly areas.
JOE DENNIS, NBN CO: Our primary objective with the fixed wireless network is to cover as many houses as we can in any given cell. But, we're bound by the laws of physics and we're using that mobile 4G technology. We can't go through hills or round mountains, but we aim to optimise each given cell for each tower.
SEAN MURPHY: Well was that a mistake? I mean, surely you anticipated that you'd have hills and trees when you bought the technology.
JOE DENNIS: Yes, sure. The further you get out in any given cell, obviously you get a weaker signal - exactly the way the mobile phone network operates. But in every given cell, in every fixed wireless area, our engineers aim to maximise that tower for the most amount of premises.
SEAN MURPHY: NBN Co says two new satellites will be launched in 2015 which will connect around 200,000 premises in rural and regional Australia. It'll deliver speeds of around 25 megabits per second, which equals what most city-dwelling Australians have today. The NBN satellites represent a near $2 billion investment, but the cost of smart farming is getting cheaper all the time.
DEREK SCHNEIDER: A very simple little biomass sensor or an active optical sensor. It's been developed in the cropping industry, but we're looking at its application to measure pasture biomass. The original, traditional sort of devices like this which are coming more out of the dairy industry cost upwards of $5,000, but this little thing costs you about $500 and obviously if we can develop a cheap smartphone app - and most producers are walking around with smartphones these days - the combination of those two is a very powerful and affordable tool.
SEAN MURPHY: At the Kirby SMART Farm, they're also using satellite mapping technology that costs as little as $200. It's already affordable. The challenge for Australian farmers now is making it pay.
DAVID LAMB: Like all technology, we can face death by data, for sure. It's about rendering all that data down into critical, actionable information. Now, the farmer doesn't necessarily have to be able to go on the website and trawl through masses of data. That information, for example, a livestock tracking technology, could be rendered down to a simple SMS alert.
Let's say you have an animal calving. Send the farmer an SMS alert to say animal number 58 is likely to be calving based on their behaviour. Same with the pasture. If you have a satellite product monitoring your pastures, maybe get an SMS alert when your pasture biomass drops below 1,000 kilograms per hectare, which is a level at which you want to move your animals off to maintain a good bounce back when the rains come again.
So, you can generate very simple pieces of information but have a lot of smarts behind it and that's where the whole chain comes together.