Dirty Tech Talk

I'm Andy Clark from Agriculture Victoria and today we'll be looking at weather stations.

Weather is so important to farming so having a weather station on your farm helps you understand the microclimate around you and this will help you make more informed decisions on your farm.

A typical weather station will give you humidity and temperature, a rain gauge, and wind speed and direction. These are great for being able to work out different elements that are happening on your property.

A more advanced weather station could include solar radiation, barometric pressure, soil moisture and leaf wetness for frost warnings.

A good weather station can help you with things like irrigation scheduling and when's the best time to spray.

So basically our weather station connected to the internet will stop you from having to pull on your boots head outside check your rain gauge when you can have the information sent directly to your phone.

For more information to help you navigate the ever-changing world of digital technology head on over to our YouTube channel or website.

See you next time.

I'm Yan Lai from Agriculture Victoria and today we are looking at dashboards.

So dashboards are essentially an application or a program that can be used on your computer or smart device such as your tablet or mobile phone and it basically presents to you all the information on your farm in one accessible place.

For instance, dashboards can really help you to manage the silos on your farm even if you're not on the property. You can use your dashboard to check how much grain you have available in your silo.

It sort of helps with safety in regards to not having to climb up and physically check how much grain you have in your silo and you can even set alerts to let you know when it's time to order more grain so that you're never missing out on feeding your livestock.

Certain dashboards can pull in data from off your farm and combined with on-farm data this can help you make better predictions for your production and it could even help you prepare budgets for your bank manager.

For more information to help you navigate the ever-changing world of digital technology head on over to our YouTube channel or website.

See you next time.

Welcome to Dirty Tech Talk a new series where we break down the hype around ag-tech and how you can use it on your farm.

I'm Mark Gould from Agriculture Victoria and today we're going to talk about soil moisture probes.

So moisture probes, as you'd imagine, takes measures of moisture in the soil. They can measure from the very surface of the soil all the way down to one and a half metres.

They can also measure things like pH, temperature, salinity and nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphate and phosphorus.

Soil moisture probes need to send their data up to the cloud so they have a mechanism of either attaching the connectivity directly to the probe or it's attached by a cable to a node that will then send the data up to the cloud.

It can also be used for making decisions about whether my crop is actually going to get to harvest or if I should make a decision to cut for hay early and market that product as hay.

So one of the farmers that I've met recently is using soil moisture probes throughout his farm. He has three different types of soil across the farm and so he places the soil moisture probe in each of those soil types and that gives him specific information about the types of moisture within those types of soil which obviously helps with identifying the types of crop that you might sow in each of those soil types.

Our team here at Agriculture Victoria has developed a soil moisture monitoring network. It's a really great resource to take a look at. It just gives you some real good insights into what the soil moisture is looking like across the state.

For more information to help you navigate the ever-changing world of digital technology head on over to our YouTube channel or website.

See you next time.

Welcome to Dirty Tech Talk a new series where we break down the hype around ag-tech and how you can use it on your farm.

I'm Mark Sloan from Agriculture Victoria and today we're looking at connectivity.

Connectivity at a really high level is all about the transfer of data. Primarily when we talk about connectivity we mean internet connectivity.

So that could be anything from streaming Netflix in the cab of your header or sending an SMS standing on dam bank.

Sending an SMS and you have to go and stand on a dam bank is really poor connectivity, whereas streaming Netflix in the cab of your header, that's really good connectivity.

Connectivity is really important to farms for a number of reasons.

The most important reason is having that easy access to data and information. For instance, a farmer might be out in the paddock wondering if they should start sowing, they can look at an app on their phone, look at the weather forecast, they can make a decision there and then on the spot.

Other reasons why good connectivity is important is collecting data from say a soil moisture probe and then being able to access it later on when they need to.

Connectivity is already helping farmers in a number of ways one being with their water management practices. This includes water level monitoring, water quality monitoring, trough level monitoring, dam level monitoring and irrigation bay monitoring.

So a lot of farmers are already using improved connectivity for things like asset tracking, silo level monitoring and site security monitoring.

For more information to help you navigate the ever-changing world of digital technology head on over to our YouTube channel or website.

See you next time.