Amid the hype surrounding digital technology, Meat & Livestock Australia is putting a range of innovations to the test on-farm with the aim of developing a best practice guide.
Red meat producers had the opportunity to see how digital technology is being tested in a commercial enterprise and talk to a range of service providers when MLA hosted its Digital Forum as part of Red Meat 2018 in Canberra in November.
The forum included a tour for close to 200 producers and industry stakeholders to Carwoola Pastoral Company’s historic Carwoola Station, east of Queanbeyan.
Carwoola Pastoral Company is owned by Rob Purves and Bronwyn Darlington, and managed by Darren Price and his wife Lyndie. Mr Price manages five properties totalling 6000 hectares, running an Angus breeding herd of about 1000 cows, and 8000 first-cross ewes.
MLA and 20 solution providers have installed a range of digital tools across the five properties over the past three months, which Mr Price and his team are now putting to the test for the next 18 to 36 months as part of the MLA project.
Digital solutions that have been installed include water monitors for troughs, tanks and dams; weather stations and rain gauges; diesel tank monitors; soil probes; sheep and cattle tags; gate and cattle ramp monitors; digital mapping; electric fence monitors; smoke alarms and shed condition monitor devices; apiary monitoring device; vehicle and asset tracking; farm management software; drone technology; silo level monitors; and animal handling systems.
“At the end of this project we’ll give a ‘health report’ on the technology and we, along with MLA, will give confidential feedback to providers, with a view to MLA developing a best practice guide,” Mr Price said.
“It’s a little early to be able to put a value on some of this technology and provide a complete digital value proposition. However, we have started to use some of the data in our decision-making, particularly water monitoring and cattle tag data.
“When you put these systems in place, there’s a lot, as a producer, to learn about how it all functions and what can go wrong or how you need to tweak this or that.
“We’re going to try to tailor each system with solution providers so the dashboards and alerts are meaningful and useful to us and flexible to use. We’d like to see the solution providers share data with each other and build an overarching platform so we don’t have to have a lot of different apps to gather our data.”
The project with Carwoola Pastoral Company is just one of a range of R&D projects MLA is undertaking as part of its broader objective to develop a digitally enabled, consumer focused value chain for the red meat and livestock industry.
MLA General Manager – MDC, Research, Development & Innovation Sean Starling said digital technology offered a range of benefits, including meeting the changing needs of consumers globally.
“Consumers are buying our product differently and want to know about our supply chain,” Mr Starling said.
“A key example of this technology is the Supermarket of the Future (SotF), designed by Italian innovation firm Carlo Ratti Associati. Simply by hovering their hand over an item in a food display cabinet, consumers can see a range of information about an individual product, including provenance and recipe ideas on suspended screens.
“Retail is where most consumers first engage with our product and we need the supply chain to be digitally enabled for that to occur.
“MLA is undertaking industry programs that underpin consumer demand for industry data, be that in the SotF or through interactive packaging technology that connects consumers back to the farm and allows us to tell the producer and supply chain story.”
Mr Starling said MLA was also talking with the developers of interactive packaging technology used by Treasury Wine Estates on its 19 Crimes range of wines. By downloading the Living Wine Labels app and pointing their smart phones over the label on the 19 Crimes bottles, consumers can see the convicts pictured on the label come to life and tell their true life stories through augmented reality.
“We’re investigating the value proposition and how we might develop similar technology for the red meat industry, that will enable the industry to tell a producer or industry story,” Mr Starling said.
