Smart Farming Technologies Produce Fertile Ground for Agnov8

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Smart Farming Technologies Produce Fertile Ground for Agnov8

Australian solutions provider Agnov8 is implementing IoT to grow business in areas like soil and water management.

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Agnov8, an Australian technology solutions provider focused on the agriculture market, sees IoT as a way to deliver operational awareness to farm managers and growers.

The company's smart farming technologies allow its customers to gain intelligence on increasing crop yields and initiating sustainable water and soil management efforts, or to gain access to environmental insights that will allow them to stay a step ahead of the very volatile Mother Nature, explained Luuk Honings, CTO for the firm.

In addition to an array of IoT sensors, Agnov8 also delivers smart farming technologies including nursery management software, ruggedized hardware, and Wi-Fi and other communications capabilities. The goal is to create products that will empower farmers and nurseries to transform operations without actually having to be hands-on with technology that might be outside their comfort zone.

"We want to make technology accessible to growers who know about technology, but don't know where to start," Honings explained. "It's such a wide field -- we ensure that our clients get the right technology and solution for what they actually need to improve their production and bolster crop yield."

One such Agnov8 client is Cameron's Nursery, based in Arcadia, Australia, which has won several awards for sustainable water management thanks to its closed-loop system, which reuses water captured from local rainfall events and irrigation cycles.

A critical component to Cameron's sustainable water effort involves monitoring water quality to ensure what is captured is adequately filtered. However, the existing process was highly manual, thus, time-consuming and expensive, Honings explained.

With the Waspmote Plug & Sense sensor platform from Libelium, Agnov8 was able to replace the manual processes with a real-time monitoring system that tracks soil, water quality, water storage and other environmental parameters, including wind speed and weather, from three locations.

All the sensor nodes are connected through a meshed Wi-Fi network, which uses Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 authentication for security, and data is sent to the cloud in five- to 15-minute intervals, making for a steady stream of real-time information.

Agnov8 has created dashboards that allow users to review sensor measurement data in real time, instead of physically having to travel around to the various locations to take manual readings, and the raw data can also be downloaded for further analysis, Honings explained. The team is working to add an alerting capability that will raise alarms if there's a water-quality problem.

While the IoT-sensor platform was not without its fair share of challenges -- connectivity in the relatively remote areas of Australia was a key concern, as was security -- Honings sees a fertile future for Agnov8 delivering IoT and smart farming technologies to the agriculture sector, along with the possibility of other industries.

"IoT is opening up new opportunities for us," Honings said. "There's a lot of interest and a lot of potential other industries that have fairly similar needs."

Read more: IoT Agenda

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