We use digital data in our everyday lives, and now there is a way to break the ‘data drought’ for our farmers. Let’s face it, they’ve certainly had a rough trot lately.
Our farmers have stared down the barrel of one of the worst droughts in history. Combine this with a devastating bushfire season followed closely by flooding rains, and they’ve really been through the ringer! Not to mention COVID-19 thrown into the mix. They need to be prepped and ready for anything.
To help get Aussie farmers up to speed, Digital Agriculture Services (DAS) is giving them high-tech intel on their land. This includes productivity, land use, sales, yield potential and other digital help — all at their fingertips. And at absolutely no charge.
DAS’s Rural Property Reports use AI to provide vital new data to farmers. Credit: DAS
Putting the AI in sustAInability
High-tech farming isn’t just drones checking water sources, or autonomous robots picking fruit. Farms of the future are all about intelligence. For example, predicting how much a farm can produce, the income it can make and its sustainability.
Agriculture is a $5 trillion top global industry yet it is one of the world’s least digitised. DAS estimates around $125 billion annually in agricultural economic decisions are based on unreliable or incomplete data. But with science-backed intelligence like this, farmers can make better informed decisions. They can put their crystal ball back in the shed!
The Rural Intelligence Platform
DAS’s innovative Rural Intelligence Platform™ uses AI we developed. It also includes our machine learning, cloud-based geospatial technology and unique data sets and analytics.
And it uses information from Australia’s digital soil map and the Bureau of Meteorology. It’s all combined to create an instant and comprehensive snapshot of a property or farming region. And now, DAS’s new one-click rural property reports pull together comprehensive data on every farm in Australia.
DAS Rural Property Report climate detail. Image credit: DAS
At your fingertips
Farmers get the low down on soil types, land use, annual rainfall and vegetation. Not to mention carrying capacity, plant productivity, climate conditions and risk profile for natural disasters. Also included is info on drought, flood and bushfire risk.
This is the first time a report includes broader predictors on agricultural value such as climate, drought stress and fire vulnerability. And it’s backed by science!
All you need to do is login to the Rural Intelligence Platform™. You simply click on your property boundaries, generate the report and it arrives to their inbox in seconds. More than 1000 rural property reports have been downloaded this month already.
Partners for farmers
We are a founding equity partner in DAS and its research and development partner. In March this year DAS incorporated our Graincast™ technology into the platform. It’s the first to identify crop types and forecast grain yield at any scale anywhere in Australia.
Yet another way we’re working with DAS to help our farmers and agribusiness when they need it the most.
26th June 2020 at 12:47 pm
In 40 years doing crop water use efficiency work (for CSIRO) I found the single most important determination of yield (in cereals ) is growing season rainfall. Over the past 60 years, much of southern Oz has seen big shifts of rain from useful winter rain to (useless) summer rain. In some sites annual rainfall has only changed a bit while growing season rain has reduced by 5-30% over 60 years. Farmers need growing season rain statistics, not annual rain. With some intelligence, eg use APSIM , you could also separate ‘useful’ rain from useless rain (ie rain that mostly ran off , cause water logging, or rain that came in many small events and evaporated before it got to the soil)
It would seem to me that this technology could also be used to get a MUCH better estimate of Goyders Line(GL). (Google for the history of the line if you are not south australian) Basically , it marks the geographical boundary between where it is possible for a good farmer to make a living growing cereals, and the areas where the nett productivity over (say) a decade says that even a good farmer needs to be looking for alternatives to cereals. My work suggests that over much of SA , since 1970, Goyders line has been moving south at around 1km/ year. This rate means that a viable cereal property may become non viable in a generation. We have farmers committing suicide because they cannot get the same yields their farther got.
26th June 2020 at 12:17 pm
“bringing together deep digital, domain knowledge and multi-disciplinary expertise into a globally scalable delivery organisation”. I used to have a computer program that generated phrases like that automatically. I called it “baffleGab”
29th May 2020 at 11:53 am
Great resource, shocking customer support. Hope it improves given its public data.
27th May 2020 at 11:55 am
back up water from monsoonal rain is important for farming and renewable energy production
27th May 2020 at 11:03 am
Great resource – just hope our farmers use it – change will be their hurdle!