Vegetable heat alert systems wins national tech award

The award was the agriculture component of GovHack, an annual open data competition held in Australia and New Zealand which pushes entrants to come up with new, interesting and innovative ways to benefit the community through information technology in just 46 hours.

The three-man team consisted of the University of Southern Queensland (USQ)'s Dr Keith Pembleton and Associate Professor Adam Sparks, plus University of Queensland undergrad Gordon Grundy.

They came up with the idea of pulling together streams of government data to produce a warning system to alert farmers about possible damaging heat events on vegetables.

The prototype is now being developed into a tool which Queensland growers can use.

They dubbed their project "John Conner" after the protagonist in The Terminator movies, with the idea of it being able to terminate one of the key challenges vegetable growers face.

John Conner integrates Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) and Queensland Government data to predict and measure localised heat-stress events.

It then passes data on to vegetable growers as quickly as possible via email or text-message warnings to enable them to take preventive actions like irrigation or early harvest to minimise crop losses.

The hack uses hourly weather data from the BoM to test and validate weather down-scaling methodologies, and combines this with daily weather data from the Queensland Government’s SILO database.

It also incorporates data from the ABS’s National Regional Profile to report on whole-of-industry impacts of the adverse weather event.

The Toowoomba trio were handed the runner-up 2016 GovHack award in the Queensland Science Sandpit category but were announced as the national Paddock to Plate GovHack award winners last week.

"What we produced we thought was kind of cool but we didn't expect to go this far," Keith Pembelton, senior research fellow, ag systems modelling at the Agriculture Systems Modelling Research Group, USQ said.

For Dr Pembleton, who grew up on a dairy farm, getting the work recognised on a national stage was one of the biggest rewards.

He said with farmers generally being time-poor, it was up to researchers to develop useful products which utilise those data sets into a practical tool.

"There is plenty of data out there and farms have become very data-rich environments but it's not much use if you don't know how to use it," Dr Pembleton said. 

Australia is generally on the right track in terms of its approach to agriculture technology, according to Dr Pembleton.

"One of the biggest challenges is bring ag tech to market," he said.

"With all these developments you've got to ask, what's the payload to these technologies?"

Associate Professor Sparks said he was on a flight between Korea and Singapore when the award was announced.

"The first text that came through after I landed was from Keith saying 'We won'," Associate Professor Sparks said.

Having also come from a dairy farm in Indiana, USA, Associate Professor Sparks' agricultural background helped him appreciate the need for farmers to have relevant data tools.

"There is the possibility of it going beyond just heat stress warnings to also include cold stress and plant disease pressures," he said.

"Farmers don't have time to filter all the data so they need it in a usable form.

"Farmers are interested in this stuff and it shows exactly what is possible."

He said one of the flow-on benefits from winning the national award has been the interest from third parties in developing the program further.

While the idea was provided as a proof of concept, future development will include in-field sensors and farm trials.