IMAGINE every chair in the world has a sim card, so you can track its movements from the day it was built to the day it breaks and is thrown out.
You could track exactly how many chairs were being sat on at any given moment, and exactly how many were not.
While this information might seem completely unimportant, and probably is, we are now living in a technological age where this is possible.
It’s called Internet of Things (IoT) technology, and it is the idea that every item in the world has its own identification number, that is trackable and can provide all sorts of data and information.
This technology is becoming more prominent in agriculture, according to SproutX general manager Sam Trethewey.
“Each individual item on a farm could have sensors that provide data on all sorts of things, like moisture, salinity, temperature, humidity, light, whatever you’d like,” Mr Trethewey said.
“We’re seeing guys come through with IoT technology that manages the output of water infrastructure, like irrigation and pumps, so farmers can know how much water is going out, and where it is going, and at what time.
“You could even have sensors on the side of the pump that picks up on the vibrations and the sound of the pump, and when that changes, it sends an alert to let you know that something is wrong.”
While internet banking, and other apps like eBay, PayPal, and even Uber and Airtasker, are a big part of people’s day-to-day lives, financial technology (fintech) is also increasing in agricultural popularity.
“It might not be agricultural technology, it’s moreso fintech, but it has an agricultural purpose, and that’s why we’re seeing it become more popular,” Mr Trethewey said.
Fintech allows farmers to make transactions over the internet, whether it is buying or selling.
“If a farmer wanted to buy water, he could get on a app and say he needs 50 megalitres of water, and that would send an alert to everyone on the app in the area that sells water, and they can offer their 50 megalitres of water and say they’re selling it at whatever price,” he said.
“Then the first guy can click ‘buy’ on the app, and then the technology in the app can do all of the contracts and finances for them.”
SproutX is an Australian leader in agricultural innovation and technology, but Mr Trethewey admitted, most farmers associate robotics and drones when they think ‘agtech’.
But there is so much more to agricultural technology.
“There certainly hasn’t been all of the drones and robotics that people typically associate with agtech, drones are cool, but nobody’s worked out how to make money out of them yet,” he said.
“I know a few farmers who have drones, and they’re good for checking water and livestock, and some even have some pretty cool cameras on them, and all of that information is cool to know, but it’s about figuring out what to do with that information.”
He said once drones become capable of benefiting a farmer’s bottom line, they will become more widespread.
“I think drones will become more and more valuable as IoT technology picks up, so once a drone can talk to a tractor, and a tractor can do something without a human having to intervene, that’s when they’ll become more valuable,” he said.
“But right now, a drone is a stand alone tool, so it is limited in its capabilities to impact the bottom line of a farmer’s business.”
He said most agtechs were focused on the same point of the agriculture supply chain, which is at the farmgate.
“The fact that we’re out there doing an agtech accelerator generally attracts that sort of stuff, not to say we wouldn’t support an agtech that was involved further down the supply chain in processing or something like that, it just seems to be that that’s where the interest is going,” he said.
“People love agriculture, and there’s a lot of hype around agriculture and food production and food safety and traceability right now, so we’re finding that any technological people that come into ag are generally looking into the farmgate, because that’s the most obvious place to start, and I can make sense of that.”
