In Armidale, 10km north east of the University of New England Campus, Kirby Farm is a 728ha ­working commercial farm that has being transformed to demonstrate the benefits of SMART technology and fast broadband for farming.

Scientists at CSIRO’s Digital Productivity and Services Flagship (DPAS) and UNE’s Precision Agriculture Group supported by the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation (ACBI) are involved in the project.

A key component of the project is the use of live sensor networks to collect on-farm data that can be used to help make informed management decisions to optimise crop outputs and rates, and grazing management.

This technology can assist with longer-term large scale behavioural monitoring studies and when combined with GPS it will allow farmers and agricultural researchers to understand how each animal moves and uses paddocks.

 “Two different systems that we are trialling up here are GPS tracking collars and Taggle ear tags,” Dr Mark Trotter, Senior Lecturer at University of New England, School of Environmental and Rural Science, Precision Agriculture Research Group said.

“We tend to do different research with those particular devices, you put the GPS collar on the animal, let them out into the paddock for a few months, bring them back in, take the collars off, download the data and see what they have been up to, this system is not real time.

“The other system we have up here is an ear-tag tracking system, that’s not GPS based, it is a slightly different system that we call a radio beacon triangulation ­system which is a bit like GPS in reverse, in that a tag emits a radio ping to towers that we have located around the property, these pick up the signal, then we triangulate the location of that beacon in real time, positions come into us in real time, every 15 minutes we get a location of the animal.”

At present there are no commercial systems available that have the capabilities or features similar to those that the project team is working on.