Comms technology can play a big role in farming safety

The safety of lone workers was ranked as one of the biggest benefits of a new system being trialled on a number of farms across Scotland, which has the potential to revolutionise the way in which many daily farm tasks are conducted and monitored.

The poor connectivity in many farms and rural areas, with dial-up broadband speeds and mobile signal not-spots has hampered the uptake of many of the benefits offered by on-farm connectivity.

However a new system based on radio signals, the LoRaWAN (low-power long-range wide-area network) protocol - which relies on neither mobile phone signal nor broadband connectivity - has the capability to connect almost every area of the farm through a central base unit and digital gateway.

And, when combined with constantly developing sensor technology, a whole host of warning, monitoring and data collection capabilities could be harnessed to improve decision making processes while saving labour on many daily monitoring tasks.

At a webinar on a project which is trialling the system, the farm co-operative organisation, SAOS, highlighted some of the major benefits such a systems provide, with three test-bed farms revealing how the system had benefited their businesses.

Digital lead with SAOS, George Noble, said that when linked with new sensor technology the system could monitor a wide range of variables over a 15km range – providing the ability to record, monitor and warn on a whole host of issues.

He said that low-powered sensors feeding into the system had battery lives of up to ten years – and that the aim of the project was to highlight the solutions which the use of such devices could offer, with an emphasis on business benefits rather than the tech itself:

“We’re looking at the solutions which linking these sensors can offer, with the focus on making sure that they’re straightforward to use, farm-proof and don’t offer the user hassle.”

While sensors could send alarms to the farmer when water troughs were leaking or river levels were rising, others offered the capability to monitor environmental conditions within cattle sheds and could forewarn of the conditions likely to cause outbreaks of pneumonia.

Sensors recording soil temperature and moisture could advise when the T-sum 200 had been reached for first top-dressing applications and also to ensure better nitrogen use efficiency with further applications. The sensors could also be used to share information with agronomists and advisors to advise on spray timings.

Low-cost temperature probes could monitor bulk temperatures in grain stores, leading to less spoilage and also providing records of measurements for assurance and traceability schemes, while sensors attached to vehicles could provide information on their location, work-rates and fuel usage.

Blairgowrie farmers, Neil and Debbie McGowan highlighted that a simple temperature probe in their vaccine fridge had warned them of poor temperature control which had threatened to render over £2,000 of vaccine useless.

And with only poor mobile coverage the system also offered peace of mind for lone workers, with a simple personnel beacon allowing alarms to be raised even where there was no cellphone signal.