The WA Government has awarded fifteen agricultural IoT project grants totalling almost $583,000 under the eConnected Grainbelt Project’s new WA IoT DecisionAg Grant Program.
The program contains three components which seek to investigate:
– effective on-farm connectivity solutions to support IoT applications and devices;
– the use of IoT applications and devices to support on-farm decision making operating off the on-farm connectivity solutions;
– the use of data analytic platforms to collect, aggregate and analyse the data collected on-farm.
The funding will be shared between eight grower groups and five agricultural schools/colleges and, according to the WA Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, their co-contributions take the combined value of the projects to about $1.3m.
The department says the funds have been allocated for on-farm trials to improve on-farm connectivity, to test connected digital agricultural technologies and software platforms to collect, store and analyse data that will assist growers to make more informed, data-driven decisions.
“The connectivity solutions to be demonstrated by the successful applicants include LoRaWAN and wireless mesh technology,” it said.
“A range of IoT apps and devices were chosen to be utilised. And the projects included varied uses such as water tank monitoring and security cameras. The recipients will demonstrate these technologies over multiple farm properties, within grower groups, across a large 16,000ha property and on agricultural school farms.”
