AGRICULTURE industry experts from around Australia and New Zealand descended on Western Sydney University (WSU) Hawkesbury campus last week to view the inroads the campus is making in smart farming techniques.
A field tour was conducted as part of the ‘ANZ Smart Farms and Agtech Forum: Future of Farming with Precision Agriculture, Big Data and Robotics Conference’ which was being held at Sydney’s International Convention Centre.
Guests looked upon the new agtech installations at Hawkesbury including the National Vegetable Protected Cropping Centre, climate-controlled glasshouses and the newly-installed Internet Of Things sensor system, The Yield, that offers new insights into best-practice farm management and agricultural teaching and learning.
Hawkesbury is the first university to implement The Yield on its farm - a system of sensors, nodes and cloud computing hardware and software that uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
It captures field data such as temperature, humidity and rainfall and processes that data centrally to help farmers and scientists produce better yield forecasts and more precisely monitor the progress of their crops through mobile phone dashboards.
The National Vegetable Protected Cropping Centre is an 1800-square-metre glasshouse designed with the world’s best available glasshouse systems and computer controls to optimise the way food crops are grown, with a small footprint relative to the potential yield and resource usage.
WSU recently signed Memoranda of Understanding agreements with 13 of the best research organisations in India that will bring 42 new PhD students in agriculture sciences to Hawkesbury over five years.
