Forget the Internet of Things, this week we are all about the Internet of cows, sheep and oysters!

From monitoring soil moisture to measuring oyster heartbeats, we have just released a new research report which reveals how 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 and data made available in easily accessible web tools.

Broadband brings in the beef

The rollout of Australia’s next generation broadband network and the growing impact of the digital economy through the adoption of smart digital services have the potential to help the rural sector meet its productivity and sustainability challenges.

While the use of computing and sensor technologies have been used on Australian farms for the last two decades, Aussie farmers are yet to fully realise the true potential of these innovations. Through the digital economy, there are range of new and exciting developments that will help transform the effectiveness and ability of digital services to drive innovation in rural Australia.

Some of these include:

• The National Broadband Network will create broadband hot-spots on all Australian farms that can enable a broad range of digital services
• Low cost and ubiquitous sensor technology will create “an internet of things” including collecting information on crops, livestock, water, weather, farm equipment and other things. Check out how we are using new micro-sensors to measure the heartbeats of oysters:

• The availability of spatially-enabled, mobile sensing technologies for characterising farmscapes and measuring changes in biomass
• Smart personal devices and apps will make accessing information on the move easier
• The growing ability to analyse diverse information sources (referred to as “big data”) using cloud computing capacity

We will be presenting some of the findings from the report at the University of New England’s Digital Rural Futures Conference 26-28^th June. To help make it clearer on why we are connecting cows and sensing soil, will be bringing some more examples of our Smart Farming projects over the next week. Stay tuned!

Part of our Smart Farming series

Media: Dan Chamberlain. P: +61 2 9372 4491. M: 0477 708 849. Email: daniel.chamberlain@csiro.au