Smart Farming Data Ecosystem

The Challenge

Digitisation of agriculture processes is key to delivering the National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) goal to grow Australia’s agricultural output beyond $100bn by 2030. 

Efficient sharing and reuse of that digitised data offers exponentially more opportunities to create new value through optimised operations and new revenue.

However, this relies on creating an environment where data is shared securely, where contributors are rewarded for their data and their rights maintained while an ecosystem of organisations can create new value from this data effectively and efficiently.
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The Solution

Telstra’s ‘Farm Data Services’ platform aims to overcome the challenge of securely managing and integrating data from multiple technologies across the farm.

Enabled through Telstra’s DataHub, the Farm Data Services is a highly scalable and secure data sharing platform that can integrate, standardise and, with permission of data owner, distribute data sets from existing agtech deployments.

This project tested the value a platform can provide farmers, agritechs, institutions and researchers, connecting applications across a farm to simplify permissioned sharing of data and creating a single point to access permissioned data for analysis and research.

The platform was trialled at the Global Digital Farm in Wagga Wagga connecting multiple CSU IoT and farm data sources and trialling the use of the platform with various CSU and project stakeholders such as research students and analysts.

Key outcomes

The project achieved the following outcomes against these key results:

• Data connectivity: Proved the feasibility and speed of connecting new agriculture data sources to a central data platform. The system was able to centralise and standardise similar data such as weather observations from different sources and formats.
• Data usage: Researchers and project participants were seamlessly able to connect to a single Application Programmable Interface (API) to consume the data they needed for their project without having to individually integrate to each data source for each of their projects. The feedback was that this centralisation saved a great deal of time.
• Data value: When receiving feedback on the data value during the project, it was found that the general sentiment was that the more data sets that are connected the higher value users placed on the platform. For this project as there were only 5 types of data sets connected, and participants felt more were needed to increase the value of the system for them to use it more regularly.

The results of the project showed that the Telstra Data Hub can enable a smart data ecosystem for farming, where data from various sources can be securely and seamlessly shared, analysed, and visualised. The user feedback indicated that the platform was easy to use, reliable and useful for research and decision making.

Read the project's final report.

For more information, please contact projects@foodagility.com

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