FROM ACROSSGETTING

THE FARM,How mobility can transform the products and experiences you deliver to customers

David Walker, Agri-Business Development Manager, Spark

DATAFAST

The farmers and growers that best serve customers are the ones that can make decisions in the shortest possible time.

They’re using mobility and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to automate previously manual processes and drastically reduce response times for critical operations.

To do this they collect data from across the farm that lets them understand the state of their operation in real-time and make more accurate predictions about where it is going.

Every entity that contributes to the efficient and profitable operation of the farm needs to be captured and saved. That includes all kinds of measures — like soil moisture, soil temperature, water levels, weather conditions and so on — that take the guesswork out of on-farm operations.

Being connected, and having greater access to data and insights, can fundamentally change the way your organisation operates. Done well it can revolutionise the way you serve your customers, capture market opportunities, make business decisions and become more environmentally sustainable.

With so many opportunities, what’s holding back many farmers from investing in new mobility, cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies?

It’s often the very thing that should be driving you forward — connectivity.

In the past, many regions had problems with connectivity issues.

You know the type of thing — patchy mobile coverage, slow and intermittent broadband speeds with limited bandwidth and frequent outages.

A KPMG survey showed connectivity was the second

priority for agribusiness leaders, just behind biosecurity.

However, the good news is that we’re fast coming to the end of the town and country divide.

The rollout of new mobile and broadband services is putting our rural regions increasingly on a par with urban centres.

Investments by ICT providers will ensure that many thousands of residents, farmers and businesses, especially in smaller communities and rural areas, have access to much better, faster and affordable mobile and broadband services.

It’s giving our regions urban broadband performance close to urban broadband pricing.

The improvements include:

4G rollouts nationwide to improve mobile

speeds, latency and energy efficiency.

Wireless broadband that delivers 10x faster speeds.

700Mhz spectrum to make data connectivity

available where no or slow fixed services

existed.

4G 700Mhz 10x

Regional initiatives, such as Spark’s partnership with the Canterbury Mayoral Forum to fast-track the

rollout of 4G and fast broadband services across rural Canterbury.

The improvements include:

4G

Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) investments have:

Improved broadband and mobile coverage

from 38% to 50% of the country

Installed fibre connectivity to 97% of rural schools and 39 rural hospitals.

Increased mobile coverage on state

highways from 67% to 77%

50% 77% 97%

Source: TUANZ

There’s more.Mobile networks are in for a major boost with 5G — the next generation of mobile standards.

5G’s speeds, latency, reliability and improved device battery life will make:

• Big data transfers simple and reliable• Voice and video apps incredibly smooth• Mobile and IoT apps more scalable.

Although commercial deployments of 5G are a few years away, we’re already seeing numerous use cases that rely on its ultra-reliable and very fast communication.

Autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, drones, wearables and digital assistants are providing workers with safe and flexible tools to allow better and more timely decisions.

That means it’s less about how you’re connected, whether wired or wireless, and more about what you can do once you have the bandwidth at your disposal.

So how will you take advantage of these opportunities?

It’s the content of the data that will drive the business value for you.

The biggest opportunity for our primary sector is the use of cloud, mobile and IoT technologies to capture, share and view real-time data from across the farm and sector.

It will eliminate food wastage, ensure food quality and optimise resource usage and inventories, adding value to what we currently export and developing new solutions to best meet customer needs.

It’s the one big requirement that we hear about from everyone in the sector, from the board members of our largest organisations, through to my son on his Bluff oyster farm.

So how could this work? Here’s our vison for how you can capture, share and view your data.

Capture1 Devices and sensors

2 Hyper-connectivity

Share3 Information exchange

4 Analytics

View 5 Visibility and insights

CAPTURE

CAPTURE

Devices and sensors

1

Start by collecting data from across your farm or operation using remote sensors and mobile devices. Every entity contributing to the efficient and profitable operation of your operation should

be captured and saved in on-farm management systems.

Hyper-connectivityTo link every device and sensor across your entire

operation, you’ll need multiple forms of cost-effective communications technologies. Today we have 4G

LTE and WiFi, and are investigating new LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) wireless technology to provide

you with comprehensive on-farm connectivity.

2

CAPTURE

SHARE

Information exchange

3

Once your on-farm data is available in back-office cloud apps, you then need to manage and share it with your staff and service providers. You can combine it with other publicly available data sets to get a more comprehensive view of

customers, not just their activities related to your operation.

SHARE

4

AnalyticsAnalytics will help you to cleanse and model the data.

This is where you will start to see the true value of on-farm information – where information becomes available for you to make positive decisions about tactical operational changes and improvements.

SHARE

VIEW

Visibility and insights

5

Once you’ve established trust in the quality of your on-farm information, visibility into patterns and trends becomes

available, and insights can then lead to decisions and actions that have real material outcomes for your operation.

VIEW

Over time, you can move from descriptive analytics (such as reporting, dashboards, KPIs), to predictive analytics (predicting farm machinery breakdowns or yield) and then prescriptive analytics that answer the strategic question: “What should I do for a desired outcome that will better serve my customers?”

This all adds up to massive returns for farmers and growers that invest in mobility solutions.

How massive? Let’s look at one farm enhancing sustainability and environmental quality while continuing to produce high quality food: Waiuku dairy farmer Tony Walters.

Three years ago, Tony and his wife Marlene invested in mobility technologies on their farm in Aka Aka, Waiuku.

The Walters achieved cost savings of $19,000 in the first year.

How? By shaving back $10,000 per year in supplements and $9,000 in food wastage.

+19k

They’ve reduced feed from 15kg to 10.5kg to produce 1kg of milk solids.

15kg10.5kg

And they’ve achieved 40 percent production increase over 3 years after raising output from 80,000 to 110,000 milk solids from 250 cows.

This season, they are on target for a whopping 60 percent

production increase by raising output to 125,000 milk solids from

the same number of cows.

They use a variety of mobile tools and cloud apps:

On-farm sensors monitor the environment to prove to the regulatory authority they are environmentally sustainable and compliant with resource consents.

They use a variety of mobile tools and cloud apps:

Cow shed operating temperatures and water use are automatically recorded every 30 mins as food safety procedures for Fonterra, with alerts set to warn of any plant failures that could spoil milk.

They use a variety of mobile tools and cloud apps:

ReGen’s farming tools record and monitor rainfall, soil moisture and soil temperature and help predict grass growth, plan feed budgets and decide when to apply fertiliser.

They use a variety of mobile tools and cloud apps:

Agri 360 stores data in the cloud for farm record-keeping, compliance, health and safety and job management. Farm staff and consultants can analyse activity in real-time as they are working and it saves them having to manually enter information each night.

Tony Walters, farmer, Waiuku

With wireless broadband we’re able to just get on and do what we need to do, faster than we ever have before. And now we don’t worry about whether a thunderstorm is passing through or whether we might get a hefty bill in the mail, the service is both reliable and affordable.

With a faster and more affordable internet connection, we are able to take advantage of the latest apps and online tools to store and record on-farm information.

Tony Walters, farmer, Waiuku

So what have the Walters shown us?

It’s the ability to create a truly customer-centric approach that provides the biggest opportunity for people and businesses that make their living from food, farming and the environment. It will create more innovative, sustainable and profitable businesses to lead New Zealand’s economic transformation.

The bottom line? Mobility helps make you and your team more productive, and better equipped to make strategic business decisions. That means a more compliant and environmentally sustainable operation, better products and experiences for your customers and more profit for you.

And the best thing about it — everything you need to start collecting, connecting and sharing data from across your farm is available now.

If you’d like to know more about how mobility can speed up decision-making on your farm, contact your Spark Client Manager or give us a call on:

0800 694 364

For further articles, opinions and industry insights, see sparkdigital.co.nz/insights or connect with David via LinkedIn.

For more insights into connectivity on the farm, see: Move over smart cities: How the Internet of Things is taking off on smart farms

David Walker, Agri-Business Development Manager, Spark