Image CSIRO, used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence
Goanna Ag, a subsidiary of agricultural IoT company Discovery Ag, is to provide data gathering and analytics services to cotton growers using National Narrowband Network Company’s LoRaWAN network.
NNNCo will expand its existing network to cover Goanna Ag’s service area of some three million hectares, stretching across Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area and the Murrumbidgee, Lachlan, Gwydir MacIntyre, Namoi and Macquarie valleys.
Goanna Ag, which recently secured funding from a number of investors including Westpac and Graincorp Operations, will use the network to provide connected sensors and data analytics to growers. It will combine soil moisture data from installed probes, local weather data and satellite imagery to optimise irrigation scheduling.
Goanna Ag CEO Alicia Garden said the company would help growers schedule and apply the right amount of water on crops at the right time to optimise their performance and profit.
“Every day that a cotton crop is under stress can cost a grower over $100 per hectare,” she said. “Two of the biggest predictors of crop yield are soil moisture and rainfall, which can vary widely across different parts of a farm.
“The decisions farmers make about when and where to irrigate can have a huge bearing on their annual production. If we can help them make better decisions across multiple aspects of farm management, the productivity gains will be significant.”
She said LoRaWAN networks had proved ideal for agriculture because of the low cost of sending small amounts of essential data used very little power.
“As this cotton season rolls out, Goanna Ag is deploying their first 100 gateways in NSW and Queensland, along with over 2,000 sensors across cotton farms. These sensors include soil moisture probes, rain gauges, weather stations, and water and fuel tank monitors amongst a host of others.”
She added: “Any compliant LoRaWAN sensor will be able to connect to the network, with Goanna Ag providing sensors where needed and analytics as part of its GoField and GoSense services.”
Goanna Ag was formed in 2018 when agtech company Discovery Ag (formed in 2016) acquired Goanna Telemetry, a 15 year old provider of telemetry products to the irrigated cotton market.
Connected Country JV disconnected
Discovery Ag, of which Garden is also the CEO, has an established relationship with NNNCo. In June 2017 the two formed a joint venture, Connected Country, to roll out a LoRaWAN network dedicated to the agricultural sector.
NNNCo founder and CEO Rob Zagarella described the joint venture as “an extension of the [LoRaWAN] network that we’re building nationwide [that] will help to solve connectivity and affordability problems for farmers.”
NNNCo said at the time that the network would “provide the backbone infrastructure for secure, standards-based shared networks of low-cost wireless sensors that constantly report on essential farm metrics like soil moisture, rainfall, crop health, water levels and livestock data.”
NNNCo told IoTAustralia that the network being rolled out by Goanna Ag was a continuation of the network that was to have been deployed by Connected Country. “The structure of the arrangement has changed and the name Connected Country is no longer in use, however the original intention to create an extensive rural IoT Network to enable smart agriculture solutions for farmers remains the same,” a spokesperson said.
The move to establish Connected Country came almost two years after NNNCo called on the Federal Government to invest $800 million in a LoRaWAN network to facilitate IoT connectivity for Australian agribusinesses.
