THE announcement of a three-year collaboration between one of Australia’s most well-known agriculture technology providers, Precision Agriculture, and Federation University will create pathways to make digital data more easily accessible.
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Precision Agriculture chief executive Ben Fleay said the company would work with Fed Uni’s Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation (CeRDI), best known in agricultural circles for its work with the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) on the GRDC’s on-farm trials project.
He said the CeRDI team’s expertise in digital record keeping would allow Precision Agriculture a more user-friendly means to access their comprehensive library of data.
“We’ve collected a lot of information since we began in 2009 but some of it is stored in the digital equivalent of a dusty storage cabinet in the store room,” Mr Fleay said.
“With the input of CeRDI we will be able to improve the accessibility of the data and how it can be used in conjunction with disparate data sets.”
As part of the initial series of projects in the collaboration, internally held Precision Agriculture data, such as soil test results will be combined with climate, topography and drainage information, along with other key data sets.
This will enhance the evidence-based resources available to Precision Agriculture as a basis for recommendations in a range of variable rate nutrition and soil management solutions.
“As an example, we see the issue of Plant Available Water (PAW) and how that is managed to be one thing we could really improve using these data sets,” Mr Fleay said.
“We’ll be able to combine the data to help come up with solutions for clients in terms of management strategies that might be able to help improve PAW levels.
Initially, Mr Fleay said the data sets would be available internally, but down the track he said the aim would be to allow Precision Agriculture clients, such as regional agronomists, access to allow them to diagnose issues and to come up with solutions.
“This could be assessing soil types to come up with tailored variable rate input application or to analyse climate data to come up with ideal time of sowing, there are a lot of potential uses.”
CeRDI director, Assoc Prof Helen Thompson said the volume of digital data was set to explode in Australia.
“The volume of digital data in Australia agriculture is growing exponentially, with much of it now collected by sensors,” she said.
“Our research collaboration with Precision Agriculture provides a great example of how research impact can be fostered through long-term research collaboration with industry.”