Like many regional councils, Towong Shire Council in northeast Victoria is heavily reliant on the agricultural sector. Farmers are in particular need of information about climate, soil and weather conditions to assist in irrigation management, crop agronomy, animal health issues, pest and disease control and environmental protection, but reliable, accurate data is often difficult to obtain.
With this in mind, Towong Shire Council and the Upper Murray Agribusiness Group (UMAG) developed MyFarm – a community owned web based agricultural communications network that allows farmers within Towong Shire to:
- access relevant and up to date climate information through a series of weather stations
- access easy to understand information specific to
individual farm operations - monitor soil moisture, electric fences, stock troughs
and wild dog fences - implement alarm services,such as milk vat monitoring, frost and flood warnings.
Data is collected in the field using a variety of sensors and transferred onto a server using radio telemetry and the mobile phone network. Specially designed software then presents summary data on the MyFarm website.
This use of telemetry and the internet has revolutionised the way Khancoban Station manager Bruce Saxton understands his soil. Using the MyFarm program, Bruce can check his soil moisture and temperature readings of his seed crops from more than ten kilometres away in the comfort of his office and at a time that suits him.
“Rather than having to drive out and check probes and drag heaps of data back to the office to interpret, MyFarm allows me to check the information instantly on the web and it’s all there, graphed, ready to go,” Bruce Saxton said.
Bruce, who is an agribusiness group member, has been involved with the MyFarm project for the past three years. He said the biggest advantage to him and the station’s grain and grass seed enterprise is a far improved understanding of the soil profile and how it reacts to moisture.
“We usually have one soil temperature probe and three soil moisture probes in a crop, each one at a different depth,” he said. “It’s fascinating how the soil dries out and wets up at different rates at varying depths and you really get to see what’s going on at the root zone.”
Bruce said the program had already paid huge dividends in helping to use irrigation more economically and effectively.
Towong Shire’s MyFarm Project Manager, Sandy Salmon, said the program has the potential to assist thousands of farmers nationwide.
“Telemetry is nothing new, but usually, because of the expense, it is limited to very large commercial operations,” he said. “However, thanks to what Council and UMAG have already achieved, and the fact the website with the uploaded real time data is established, we would love to extend the base and field station network so that more farmers can use it.”
Sandy Salmon said the program enables alarms to be programmed in and farmers can be alerted by SMS or email if their soil moisture falls below a certain reading, if a wild dog fence shorts out or if stock troughs or remote pumps fail.
“There is also an indicator called Delta T, which tracks the relationship between temperature, humidity and evaporation rate,” he said. “When this falls outside an ideal range, the weather is unsuitable for spraying. Anyone can access that and other weather information by just visiting the MyFarm website.”
For further information visit the MyFarm website at
www.myfarm.umag.org.au or contact Aaron van Egmond on (02) 6071 5100.
