Telstra partners with CSU and Food Agility for agtech

Agtech platform collaboration, Global Digital Farm, has commenced a 12-month trial with partners Telstra, Food Agility and Charles Sturt University.

The agricultural platform is underpinned by data sharing technology developed by Microsoft and IBM that comprise the Telstra Data Hub which is used to deploy a Farm Data Services Platform.

The 12-month trial will take place at the 1600-hectare commercial Global Digital Farm at Charles Sturt’s Wagga Wagga campus, managed in partnership with Food Agility as a test bed for agrifood research and technology.

Under the trial, Telstra will integrate farm-centric systems and data-sets with the platform and contribute its expertise in the area of data rights frameworks.

Built by Telstra with technology partners IBM and Proagrica, the secure platform integrates, standardises and distributes data sets from existing agtech deployments.

The platform aims to tackle the secure management and integration of data-driven agriculture which uses multiple technologies and data sets from across the farming ecosystem.

Global Digital Farm director Jon Medway told CRN Australia that the initiative had three initial ambitions.

Firstly, teaching to improve the digital literacy for agricultural graduates; using the data systems in operation for research purposes and in turn developing decision support tools for crop and pasture trials which feed into the commercial and business applications of how farmers can apply this technology and the data sets deployed.

“One of the issues and limitations for farmers currently is having a whole range of new technologies available but not the analysis to show how you can use that package of data in an integrated solution,” Medway said.  

The farm features an elaborate array of sensor technology that produce a range of data sources covering livestock systems, environmental measures, soil moisture probe and monitoring systems over 50 rain gauges and satellite and drone powered weather station information.  

“We are building the decision support tools to allow a farming producer to get advanced detail from soil and weather data, integrated with weekly satellite imagery and drone images combined with soil topographic and environmental analysis results,” Medway said.

“The aim is getting all these data points from isolated sensors and space imagery and finessing that into academic and commercial tools,” he added.

Technology partners that are supplying the farm’s technology include sensor suppliers Delta AG, Metos Sentek for soil probes, Planet Labs, Sentinel and Landsat for satellite in addition to using the Telstra network for communications.

The farm is also powered by a locally based, Wagga Wagga wi-fi innovator Zetifi which specialises in meeting challenges met by farmers and rural residents supplying a network with a 7 kilometre range to complement cellular coverage.

Charles Sturt vice chancellor, Professor Renee Leon PSM, said the technology and agri education partnership with Telstra was solidifying university’s ambitions to be the Australian epicentre of data-driven agrifood innovation.

“Home to the Global Digital Farm and AgriPark, the Wagga Wagga campus more closely connects the people who grow food to the innovation ecosystem, so we can get new knowledge and technologies into the hands of farmers faster,” Prof. Leon said.

The GDF has deployed a range of agtech solutions, a selection of which will be used to test the feasibility of the proposed Smart Farming Data Ecosystem.

The integration of the available data streams will also provide a single point of access for Charles Sturt farm management, teaching and research activities and enable focused programs to develop new decision support tools.

Agtech is becoming a competitive state by state race for supremacy.

Last month, the Victorian government invested $1.3 million towards startups and the creation of an agtech angel investor group.