Wimmera farmers can now apply to be part of a state government trial testing the potential of Internet of Things technology on farms.
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Agriculture Minister Jaclyn Symes visited Birchip on Friday to open expressions of interest in the $12 million program.
The Internet of Things is defined as the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects.
A spokeswoman for Ms Symes said the Internet of Things technology would allow farmers to gather on-farm data from embedding sensors on devices such as soil moisture probes, weather stations and silo storage monitors.
"Over the next two years, Agriculture Victoria will partner with hundreds of farms in the trial across four regions, dairy in Maffra, grains in Birchip, sheep in Serpentine and horticulture in Tatura." she said.
In the first round of the trial, eligible farmers will have access to grants of up to $30,000 to cover up to two-thirds of the cost of acquiring Internet of Things technology from a catalogue of products put together for the trial.
Applications close August 2. Victorian Farmers Federation president David Jochinke, of Murra Warra, said the trial represented the very start of a process to more advanced agriculture techniques that would become commonplace amongst the next generation of farmers.
"We haven't even discovered or invented all the applications IoT could have on agriculture, but in it's early stages things like machinery talking to a centralised point so it can ensure its functioning at its most efficient," he said.
"In a fundamental form it's about digitising agriculture, giving the farmers the opportunity to link up technology and for that tech to use its own smarts to provide the best decisions and outputs for the farming operation."
"There are other fields of technology that are well advanced, such as mining and aeronautics, and we can borrow a lot of things of those industries and adapt them to create uses for ourselves. But more so, we shouldn't be limiting our thought process to what we currently have, it's about what do we want to achieve as an industry and how can this technology potentially one day seamlessly automate the whole process of data collection and management decisions."
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