WA farmers get high tech solution to weather worries

1 September 2019:

The Dowerin Field Day provided an appropriate setting for Telstra and CSBP to unveil their new high tech solution to help innovate farming practices.

Telstra’s Internet of Things (Iot) technology is being used to command a new weather station which will help enable farmers to have the latest local information on a wide range of different weather variables and then they can plan accordingly.

Telstra Regional General Manager Boyd Brown said the exciting new weather station, which is currently being trialled, would help enable the farmer to assess the latest readings and data from the different weather patterns collected. Using this information, the farmer can monitor and then manage a range of on-farm operations such as water, fertiliser, grain, fuel and cropping.

“Traditionally, a farmer will draw on information from the Bureau of Meteorology for the region as well as local knowledge to make decisions around farming practices,” he said.

“This technology enables the farmer to have the latest weather information available for their particular farm, to monitor meteorological activity at a local level. They can interpret the collected facts and figures and decide on the appropriate action to manage the farm.

“The beauty is that the information can be checked over the internet through Telstra’s IoT platform. A farmer might be on holidays and overseas and yet they can still get the data and then decide on what to do next to meet any changing weather conditions.”

Mr Brown said the weather station captures temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed and direction, solar radiation and rainfall.

He said the ‘the brains’ behind the new weather station was Telstra’s Captis Environment Monitoring IoT sensor – a device which uses Telstra’s Internet of Things (IoT) network to record and store the measurements every minute or as often as required.

“In the future we expect the sensor will feed the data through to an IoT platform and the farmer can take the appropriate action,” he said.

CSBP’s Product Research Manager Justin Mercy, said Telstra’s environmental sensor was the key to providing a compact solution.

“There are so many data collecting devices available on the market and it can be very overwhelming for a grower, particularly if the data is scattered over numerous platforms. This device allows data from a number of devices to be consolidated into one platform which can be easily accessed,” he said.

“The next phase is to refine this data so it can be presented to the grower in a meaningful way to increase the efficiencies of their farming practices. CSBP is currently working on a number of projects to combine both the hardware and networking power of the Captis Environmental Logger with decision making models that will make the data useful for the grower.”

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Media contact: Mark Thompson – Media Manager
M: 0477701814
E: media@team.telstra.com
Reference number: 086/2019