MVP Pairtree- Ag IOT Dashboard MVP-0789

Peer Review Ben Watts Bralca.com NSW Australia

ben@bralca.com 0428668706

Offering an Ag dashboard to assist agriculture resource managers to more accurately access

information to assist decisions in a challenging and vast environment

1. Summary - Pairtree - Agricultural IoT dashboard proposed to be centralised dashboard for farmers and advisors for Financial, Internet of Things (IoT) and public data channels, analysis and review. Currently decision making processes are made by farm managers and advisors reviewing several streams of documents and applications separately. This project proposed to instigate a centralised analytics database allowing scenario building and analysis. Appticon utilised a financial 'Business Intelligence' (BI) platform, to deliver the visualisation and analytics. Currently there is no other commercial offering to integrate spatially diverse IoT devices, Public Channels and institutional data feeds in conjunction with financial ERP data streams.

mailto:ben@bralca.com

2. Impression - This dashboard space is developing in other areas including logistics and mining, yet

there is no offering to pull together data streams from IOT devices in vast agricultural settings. Free systems such as thingspeak can collect data, but not interpret data or present it in a meaningful way for agricultural decision making. Companies such as Hitachi and CISCO have highlighted the opportunity for this type of system to benefit the agricultural industry, but yet have not released a commercial offering as this is a new market and significant investment is required to break into any new market.

3. Abstract - The purpose, results, and global implication stated in the project proposal are consistent with the rest of the project, product development of this MVP. It was noted that Hamish ensured all communications, development and presentation to grower workshops were in line with the original MVP and focused on delivering results that industry can use, rather than sprouting what may be developed or what may be of benefit to specialist arms of industry.

4. Introduction – Hamish clearly sets out the challenge my business has been experiencing, when installing IOT equipment on many sites across Australia (including feedlots and cropping farms in NSW and large corporate pastoral operations). The common question is “where will we locate an IOT dashboard that can collate and visualise the key data sets to allow real business benefits of this data”? Whilst agriculture is seen as an older industry, concepts such as this MVP dashboard are a step towards bringing agriculture and agribusiness into the future.

5. Experimental approach – Hamish’s experimental approach to the development and refining of this dashboard has addressed his hypothesis in a reproducible way. This is important from an industry view point, as there will be further requests from industry to refine data sets or add data streams. Using the same planned approach Hamish will be able to confidently assess the fit of further quests and to understand the complex needs of agriculture clients. This soft skill is key to development of new products for this market

6. Results – Using the demonstrated data streams in the Pairtree dashboard along with the feedback from grower consultations, the results of the project have gone above and beyond the scope of the initial scope of works documents. The project has demonstrated an ability to incorporate a wide and varied set of data streams with ease and to provide analysis equivalent to high cost proprietary software systems.

7. Discussion – Hamish critically discussed the state of the project in relation to other solution providers throughout the program. In this time, discussions and notes were shared between industry hardware providers, industry installers, farmers, traders and other software developers. It is a credit to the team to have been as open as they have as this has allowed for extra learnings to better inform the development of the platform.

8. Conclusion – The resulting output of the program serves as a suitable conclusion to

the MVP application. There are 3 main areas this has answered

1. What problem will it solve?

Currently farm data is vague and collected in separate hard to access

silos

PairTree centralises and consolidates data feeds through a series of Application Programming Interface (API's) and normalisation protocols. Also PairTree is a cloud base application, conveniently allowing alerts, review and analysis on any smart device, from a phone to a laptop and PC

2. Who Will benefit from the product? Currently farmers spend significant time checking and measuring resources (Water, soil, rainfall, grain and stock production, etc.), that is extremely time consuming and marginally productive. These management activities also extend to market analysis, climatic decision making and financial analysis, which are critical for strong business performance.

Agricultural managers will benefit greatly from this centralised data. Whilst it is hard to put a dollar figure on the high-end decisions of market forecasting, seasonal forecasting or environmental monitoring criteria, A solid example of how these systems can transform a SME approach to business can be demonstrated in a simple task such as monitoring stock water.

In two of my client’s commercial applications of this IoT system they have been able to reduce their labour costs in this area by 20% of an FTE. At $90,000pa that equates to a straight up saving of AU$18,000 per annum.

If we consider the other potential benefits of this platform at many higher levels, it is not unreasonable to see a commercial farm realise benefits valued at over AU$80,000 annually through improved labour efficiencies, timely precision management decisions and improved efficiencies in production of their final sale commodities. The use of centralised data will not necessarily increase the total production or volume of all farms, rather assist farms to be more efficient which in turn increases profitability and sustainability.

9. Illustrations – The images within this review display clearly the outputs as described in the MVP application