How do farmers engage help on digitally transforming our business, and utilising technology to grow our business? Are their services out their that can look holistically at our business, recommend products and technolgoeis, and assist us in integrating and implementing them?
Hi, the Internet of Things is a program running that gives insight into all things tech on the farm. We are quite tech savy here. We have programs we use to track livestock, we use solar systems for water and trough use to keep track of total water volumes in each tank, particulary those used for biological fertiliser applications. We also implement weather stations by iMetos on the farm which enables my hubby and I to track the weather in an accurate sense as well as our sub soil moisture. Last year we could predict the frost impact on our cover crops as we had 2 weather stations installed on two farms. We were able to move our cattle and sheep from one farm with minimal coverage to reduce them from getting a cold and move then down onto the other farm that has 80% tree coverage and flats/ meadow paddocks. We have tablets which have folders in full of information about the farm - shearing management, etc. The tablets move with us everywhere we go. When we fix a fence we add it into the folder on the tablet and when we get home we transfer that document change into our program on our laptop. It makes life easier and then lere is less book work. I.e.: as we shear we have a small computer machine that we can add our new wool to and it gives us a reading of the micron of that wool and the strength so that we know what wool bag to add it too. My son is tech savy and is designing and buliding a farm bot that we will use to detect virus or disease in our crops. It is controlled by remote and will be ready to be used by the end of the year. This same boy (19yrs) designed and build a solar system that helped with our fertiliser application for spraying out on to paddocks on the farm as we couldn't find what we needed. I think the next generational are more swtiched on then us.