Smart Farming as a Service (SFaaS)

Team Name

Team Espion

Team Members

Project Description

• The driving force behind Smart Farming as a Service for Australian farms is to enable farmers to access cloud hosted modularized Farming application leveraging the spectrum of “Internet of Things”.
• The core objective of this solution is to provide a unique platform by connecting smart devices and sensors on farms to make farming autonomous, data-driven and allow decision making in real time.
• It also provides an integrated end to end solution for the farmers who are looking to adopt smart farming in a low cost cloud based subscription model.
• Smart Farming as a Service solution is built on synergy of technologies such as IoT, Data analysis, Cognitive Services, Machine Learning, and rules driven algorithms. It leverages seamless LTE-M (Cat-M1) and NB-IoT network for data transmission from farms to IOT hub. Moderns sensors for Soil pH Measurement, Tensiometer, Electronic Soil Moisture, Air Quality, Rainfall, Humidity, Multispectral Camera, Drones etc. would feed in the data directly from the farms.
• The real time data generated by the devices is meshed with external open datasets and sources, to generate alerts and recommendations for corrective actions. These actions can be remotely triggered for closed loop autonomous farming.
• Open Data sets from external sources provide valuable inputs on external driving factors like historical and forecasted weather, water levels etc.
• Further integration of our solution with DPA systems for case management provides flexibility to the end users to raise an incident with the concerned authorities or organization.

Data Story

1) 83% of Victoria’s groundwater is used for Irrigation. State of Climate report 2020 predicts longer drought times in future. Hence Groundwater use should be minimized and surface water utilization to be optimized to face future uncertainties. (Source - Victoria Water Measurement Information System)

2) In areas particularly affected by the low recharge, rainfall, and high groundwater extraction, groundwater levels were generally below average and trending downwards. (Source – BOM, Australian Groundwater Insight)

3) In 2019-2020 financial year, due to reduced water availability and increased water costs water applied to crops and pastures was down by 21% and 22% less agricultural land was irrigated as compared to previous year (Source – Australian Bureau of Statistics, Water Use on Australian Farms)

4) According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, food production must increase by 60% by 2050 to be able to feed the growing population, expected to reach 9 billion
(Source – Status of the World’s Soil Resources, FAO UN, 2015)

5) Changes in climate since 2000 have reduced average annual broadacre farm profits by 35%, or around $70,900 specifically for cropping farms (Source - ABARES Insights 2019, ANALYSIS OF The effects of drought and climate variability on Australian farms)

6) For a typical cropping farm in a normal year, profit from around $230,000 turns to a loss of $125,000 in a ‘dry year’ (Source - ABARES Insights 2019, ANALYSIS OF The effects of drought and climate variability on Australian farms)

7) For a typical Australian beef farm in a normal year, profit of around $60,000 turns to a loss of $5,000 in a ‘dry year’ (Source - ABARES Insights 2019, ANALYSIS OF The effects of drought and climate variability on Australian farms)

8) Agricultural businesses operated across just over half (51%) of Australia's total land area and of the 394 million hectares of land operated by agricultural businesses, 87% was used for grazing, which makes livestock tracking and IoT even more important
(Source – Australian Bureau of Statistics, Land Management & Farming in Australia)

9) As part of Commonwealth Interim Action plan on National Soil Strategy, Government will invest $102 million over 2 years to deliver a Pilot Soil Monitoring and Incentives Program which aims to capture and make available past and present soil data at a national scale (Source - Commonwealth Interim Action plan on National Soil Strategy)

10) Specifically, within the Murray Darling Basin region from where around 40% of Australia's agricultural produce comes and almost half (48%) of Australia's total water is used for irrigation, water use fell by 39% and agricultural land irrigated reduced by 35% as compared to previous year (Source – Australian Bureau of Statistics, Water Use on Australian Farms)

11) We have evaluated Monthly Volume and Water Level in largest reservoir of Murray-Darling Basin over last 43 years. Similar analysis done for all reservoirs of Murray-Darling Basin will be used in our solution to predict floods and droughts (Source – Murray Darling Basin Authority)