Image © Jorge Royan, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
Jannat Maqbool, a principal advisor with research firm Ecosystm, says the development of agritech in New Zealand is being held back by lack of pervasive connectivity for agricultural IoT devices and applications.
“We can’t crack the connected farm … in the sense that we can’t come up with a solution that integrates with existing infrastructure and assets and that provides ubiquitous connectivity and where the devices are interoperable and that gives the farmers an easy management dashboard/console,” Maqbool told IoTAustralia.
“Farmers want to look through one thing whereas the devices don’t all work together to be able to produce data and produce insights through one platform.”
She said there were initiatives underway to influence farmers through organisations such as Dairy NZ that have established relationship a with farmers to work with them to come up with a connected farm solution.
“The only one we have managed to crack is with the Ministry of Business and Innovation in an arable farming pilot called Kowhai Farm. It’s an example of where the technology vendors have partnered and an organisation has coordinated an approach that is a collaboration to get a connected farm solution in an arable farming environment. We need to do the same with dairy farming.”
At Kowhai Farm, a site administered by the Foundation for Arable Research, The New Zealand IoT Alliance and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment launched a joint pilot to demonstrate how digital technologies could make New Zealand agriculture more productive and more competitive.
Despite New Zealand having several LoRaWAN networks, a Sigfox network, and from Vodafone NB-IoT and CAT-M1, all designed specifically for IoT — in addition to 3G and 4G cellular — Maqbool said there was no integrated solution that enabled continuous connectivity for agricultural IoT applications, particularly for environmental monitoring of food shipments.
“Because our brand overseas is about ‘New Zealand Pure’ we need to be able to prove purity from farm to fork, and we’re struggling with that because there’s no ubiquitous connectivity for this.
“The closest we’ve come to that is a gateway installed on individual containers on a rail line and the individual containers are collecting data, and then at some point, if they find a connection along the way they are sending the data out.
“But otherwise, it’s not till you get to the other end that you can collect data to say, for example, how much vibration occurred, what the temperature was, what the humidity level was.
Maqbool said a complete, integrated solution remained a dream. “We need continuous connectivity, but we also need those devices to be interoperable between networks and to talk to each other, and to talk to existing assets and provide farmers with a way to actually manage their farms from one solution.”
She said partnership were needed between vendors, telecommunications companies and organisations that have the on-farm relationships and that are able to bring the farmers into a conversation and say “on this farm, these are the assets, these are the decisions the farmer needs to make. What can you do?”
However she saw positive signs from a recent government initiative. In July the NZ Government launched a roadmap for industry policy designed to grow more innovative industries in New Zealand and lift the productivity of key sectors. The policy put the initial focus on agritech.
“They have been flying around the country doing road shows to help organisations and entrepreneurs understand that the opportunity isn’t just in New Zealand, the opportunity is to scale globally.” Maqbool said.
“It’s a great initiative. Agtech is now on the government’s radar as its number one digital technology.”
A few days after IoTAustralia spoke to Maqbool, the NZ AI Forum released a report AI in Agriculture that called for the nation’s agriculture sector to urgently embrace artificial intelligence, particularly applying AI to data throughout the food value chain.
