I'm Paul Stewart and I'm going to give you and I'm going to give you a quick introduction to IOT in agriculture.
Just a little bit about myself: I'm a mechatronic engineer
with the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries and I'm based in Toowoomba.
So what's the Internet of Things? You might have heard
that in the media it's connecting
Internet enabled devices that relay
information, and that might be
information back to us, to cloud-based applications, or to each other (so from device to device).
And if you combine that with automated systems, it's possible to gather information, analyze it,
and maybe even create an action if you need to. So digital agriculture, including the
collection and analysis of farm data
could increase the gross value of
Australian agriculture production by
about 20 billion and IoT solutions could
actually deliver annual benefits of 14
to 22 billion to the sector.
They've worked out that that could come from
improved crop and livestock yields,
reduced wastage and livestock mortality
and operational process improvements on
the farm and maintenance and labor cost
savings and that's a big one.
Some of the current issues that are facing IoT in agriculture: many IoT systems out
there, especially when used in industrial
applications, are reliant on Internet
access through a hardwire or Wi-Fi.
Telecommunications and internet in rural Australia face issues outside towns and major centers.
That's probably no surprise to anybody listening to this;
and where there is mobile coverage
ongoing SIM card costs can be
prohibitive depending on the plan you're on,
and there's also a high cost of
setting up your own networks and nodes
and sensors, especially for off-the-shelf
and propriety products.
One of the things that I've been investigating over
the last few years is LoRa networks or
long range networks (that's what that
stands for).They can go up to 15 to 20 Km
making it suitable for extensive
agricultural systems.
They've got very low power usage, so a sensor can operate on a battery for even a couple of years.
Just to give you an idea about how
much power that is, they use anywhere
from about 25 milliwatts up to one watt
versus, if you're talking about your UHF
radio systems that are out there they
they're using five watts as a base.
From end to end, their communications are
encrypted so it's both secure on the
transmission and in the network back end.
We've got a fairly low cost of deployment
for n nodes and gateways. At the moment it's all open source. That means anybody can develop it
which means there's competition out there to keep the prices down is pretty good.
Just to give you an idea, that can be as low as twenty dollars for an individual node  if you're building
it yourself from bits or $300 for a
gateway and multiple farms can share that,
but typically costs are a
little bit higher than that.
So just to give you an idea about where LoRa fits
with all the other types of
telecommunications technology we've got
things like Wi-Fi which has a huge
bandwidth capacity but the range and the distance of it is fairly limited - you are limited to a few hundred metres.
Bluetooth - we've got a little bit less capacity in there and certainly lower...
...and for RFID, like cattle ear tags and things like that you are talking a few meters.
Then we've got our traditional 2G and 3G and 4G and even 5G networks  that are coming,
certainly lots of bandwidth capacity and a fairly long range distance,
and LoRa kind of sits down here in this
area so it's got fairly low bandwidth so
only talking small amounts of
information at any one time but it does
have long range.
The current world LoRaWAN record is 832 kilometers.
They did that with a a balloon but only
using 25 milliwatts of power. The
furthest that I've got so far is 85 kilometers.
Just to give you a bit of an
idea about how the network is set up.
We have our sensor nodes and they may be
things out in the paddock.
I'll go through some examples
in a minute
They transmit information through to a gateway and the
Gateway may sit on the farm or it may be
on your neighbor's place. They're
connected to the Internet which then
talks to (the one that I use is
called the Things Network) and it's a
server where all the information gets
sent and from there you can send it out
to lots of different places. You can send
it out to your dashboards, you can make
things happen through automation, and you can share information with a lot of other applications.
And right from end to
end we have a secure payload right from
where the node starts right through
this system. Just a bit about
LoRaWAN security -  obviously when we're
collecting lots of data, security is one
major component of that, that people
should be aware of.
Both the payload (which is the
information that's actually sent) and the
wrapper that it sits in, it's all
encrypted using 128-bit keys.
To give you an idea, this is what one of the
keys looks like. You have to get that
exact combination and a combination of
those, there's three that you actually
use, to be able to crack that. And
that is one of the the industry
standards of the moment.The LoRaWAN protocol actually offers two layers of security.
The network that it sits
on, the network session key has to
validate that the node is actually
supposed to be joining that network, and
then also that, if you send a sequence of
messages, that if somebody tries to
inject a message into there, to maybe spoof a
message coming through, if that number
doesn't match between previous one and
the next one, it gets rejected as well.
We've also got some more
security on top of that - the payload
is actually encrypted and decrypted at
either and you need keys and passwords
and things to be able to do that as well.
This basically means that even though
we're sending across public networks, nobody except you is able to
intercept and and understand those
messages. So a bit of an idea on cost, and
I suppose this is a bit of a
do-it-yourself cost, but prices are
certainly coming down for things on the
market at the moment where it's off the
shelf, ready to go. So you're talking
about the Gateway for a start and
anywhere from about 300 dollars up to
fairly expensive industrial type ones
for about three thousand dollars, but you
can really put together some cheap stuff
from China. You can see a couple
of little boards that we can use, but
mind you, this takes soldering and wires
and all that kind of stuff - most people
wouldn't want to muck around with that
stuff. But then we can put together a
little node that sends information for
us for about twenty-five dollars.
I mean, at the minimum, if you put a gateway
and a few sensors together you are looking
at about four hundred and twenty-five
dollars that you could set up a really basic network.
Certainly people
when they're starting out and playing,
like students and unis and things can
do it for that.
Some current uses that we see across other
industries - we've got industrial and home
automation and monitoring, so there's
examples of water leak detection, power
monitoring, security, and so we can do
motion and window and door sensors, smoke
and carbon monoxide alarms, and
temperature, humidity and damp sensors,
and we've got smart utilities. Smart
lights, water meters, things like that.
There's a lot of councils that are
implementing water meters with LoRaWAN
at the moment. And then there's
smart logistics - those trucking
companies that are starting to put these
kind of things in there -  that supplements
the other networks that I'll talk about
later as well. We've got things
like environmental management and
monitoring. We could see quite a few of
these around the world - there's
flooding Networks so you get
advanced warnings of floods coming down,
or things that we've got on the Great Barrier
Reef because this the long range really
assists - we can talk to a base
station that's quite a fair way away. So
in applications there's huge amounts of
sensors out there, it's just a matter of
being able to make them talk to your node and then
LoRa is just one of the transmission ways of how that we can get that information back to the internet.
So how can agricultural benefit? This is just a few of the ways that I've seen
implemented already and I'm starting to
experiment with a lot of these too. but I
But I think before you kind of start to think
about what's out there, you've got to
really focus on what the end use case is,
and maybe what's the most appropriate
thing because LoRa may not be the best
way to do it every time.
I've set up lots of weather stations so
we can determine trends and climatic
conditions at a micro level on your farm,
not just at the BOM sites. We can do
irrigation scheduling, we can use soil
moisture sensors, we can have local
environmental data going into that, you
can even start and stop pumps because we
can turn them on and off. LoRaWAN is a two-way communication and we can
make, you know, improved spraying decisions
like in create prove your record-keeping
of the conditions. We can provide local
and accurate data on your farm.
You can even have several on your farm if
you've got a topography that is
different with wind direction and stuff.
Then we've got it, we can work out
things like delta-t, just with their
weather station, and keep that up to date.
And you can even keep that in the cab of your
tractor as you're spraying, we've seen
things from like remote operations,
opening gates for grazing management, we
can get tank and trough levels so you
don't have to go and do a run around of the
property, and we even set up some pig traps with some
trap indicators to know if the pig trap gate has dropped or not.
One of the common uses that is easy
to set up, is movement sensors and
vehicle movement sensors as well, and
diesel tank monitors and alarms.
Say if you've got problem with theft, or even
just to know where things are, we can
whack a GPS on one of these little nodes
and and it can tell the location of
everything, anywhere within where you've got
your reception. When you start to get a
network of LoRaWAN gateways, this
gets better and better.
We can do livestock and crop monitoring -
I've seen little ear tags on cattle, you
can put collars on cattle as well.
We can work out grazing patterns, we can
look at soil moisture and temperature and
soil nutrients at depth. Even though
that's a bit beyond the
average kind of cropping system at the
moment because they're really expensive.
We can grab all that data, and send it
to dashboards, and and then we can also
include alerts and alarms and do
some kind of thing, so if something's out of
spec, or say, in that farm security, if we
see a tractor moving that shouldn't be
moving, now we can start to send
ourselves like an email or SMS straight away.
Or things like when we set up
weather stations, we can send it to even
community websites like Weather
Underground -  you can see one there.
Or you can build your own dashboards - it's not
so difficult and so we've got one here - you
can see that it collects lots of
information. We've got temperature
including the history of the data, and
humidity. We've got wind speed, wind
direction and then battery level of the
know just to make sure things are
charging, and we can even pull in other
information. Where I live at Highfields (just
north of Toowoomba) I can bring in the BOM
forecast as well and put all that in the one place.
Like I said before,
when we're thinking about the
appropriate technology, LoRaWAN is
good for small amounts of information
and there's certainly some providers out
there, and you probably would have heard
about Goanna AG, Tom Dowling's setup in Goondiwindi.
They're providing networks and sensors including
weather stations and soil moisture
sensors, working out of delta T and things like that so there's a great local service you can see there.
Meshed is another company in Australia that's setting up LoRaWAN networks and NNN Co as well.
They've got a big rollout in New South
Wales and then they're spreading out across Australia.
Some of the alternatives to LoRaWAN - SigFox is a very similar type of technology.
They use a model where SigFox, or Thinxstra is the company that operates in Australia, will actually set
up the networks for you and then charge
you per message type of arrangement.
Goanna AG and NNN Co kind of
work on that same thing, so you don't have
to set up a network, you don't have the
costs of maintaining it if something
goes wrong, so that's
the service that youre paying for there.
Certainly, coming up  quickly now and
expanding rapidly is narrowband IoT and
that's provided by a lot of the big
telcos. Certainly Telstra and Optus are two of
the bigger ones doing that
kind of stuff. And then we're starting to
see a lot of SIM card plans that are
becoming very affordable and and devices
out there that are starting to use these
networks. There's other ones like CAt M1 -
it's a bit more higher power usage,
so things like logistics companies and
things are going to be using those, and
then there's ones that have been
established on the market for quite a
while likeTaggle. They've been doing
cattle as well as water meters for
councils and things for quite a while.
Then there's other things like the
ZigBee, Wi-Fi - obviously you probably
heard about 'cause you use that around your
house or on your phones and things.
And then 3G and 4G and what obviously what's
coming is 5G, so that's a few of the
alternatives out there. They've all got
their pros and cons as to the distance,
the band width and the cost. LoRaWAN certainly has its place and I think
we'll see it develop as well as I think
satellite technology is also going to
improve and the costs are going to come
down on that. So it won't be too long
before we might be moving to just
satellite technology.
Thanks - that was just a quick intro for you and I sit in Toowoomba, you can get me on that
email address if you would like to send
me an email and any questions -
happy to to answer any questions and
just point people in the right direction.
Thank you.
