Digital Twins Go Farming

Among a list of Australian startups to receive a round of venture capital funding recently was agritech company, Agronomeye. It is building digital twins to help farmers maximize yields and optimize sustainability.

The funding round for Agronomeye was small, at AUD3.5 million. But it was significant for several reasons, not least because among the investors was someone ranked as the 12^th richest person in Australia with a net worth of AUD2.3 billion.

Cameron Adams is the co-founder of Australian technology startup Canva, one of the hottest unicorns the country has produced. It also dabbles in agriculture, with a few hectares on the southern island of Tasmania.

Adams told local media that he and his wife are on a mission to improve the land's biodiversity and return it to how it was before human intervention. In that project, they can see the use of digital twinning technology.

“It was impressive from a tech standpoint,” Adams told the Australian Financial Review

“From our personal usage of it, we could see how others could use it. You can visualize the land and water flow and bring land management into the 21^st century.”

Disparate data sets

Agronomeye is a collaboration with Australia’s national science organization, the CSIRO, and Microsoft. It has created a new platform aggregating disparate data sets to deliver a fuller picture of farm properties above and below the surface.

One of the critical technologies to be leveraged is Azure FarmBeats, a business-to-business cloud offering on Azure Marketplace that enables users to build AI and machine learning models based on fused data sets.

This enables a range of uses, from assessing farm health through the creation of a ‘vegetation and water index’ based on satellite imagery, creating a soil moisture map based on a combination of sensor and satellite data, and tracking farm conditions from aggregating data from various third party sensors and providers.

“You can visualize the land and water flow and bring land management into the 21^st century”

Agronomeye has been on something of a journey with its technology. First, it began using drones to capture high resolution images of crops. Still, the founders realized they needed a complete picture. This meant leveraging LiDAR — laser-based remote sensing technology — to create a digital twin from aggregated data sets.

Launched 12 months ago, Agronomeye is currently in use across 2.5 million hectares of land used for livestock and vineyards. It advises farms on decisions from their sowing timetables to plans for water catchments that take maximum advantage of their properties’ natural flow patterns.

The CSIRO’s Agricultural Research Station at Boorowa in New South Wales is used to illustrate the technology, presenting a collection of data channeled through CSIRO’s Senaps platform and Microsoft Azure FarmBeats. 

Data is sourced from in-soil and on-farm sensors, satellite imagery, and drones, as well as from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, all of which can be analyzed using AI and ML on the platform.

So, while the AUD3.5 million funding round might sound small, the potential is significant. Agronomeye can help farmers make their land more productive and be a driver for a new era of modern, resilient, and sustainable digital farming.

Beyond twinning

While a leader in Australia, Agronomeye is by no means the only tech company using digital twinning in agriculture.

In the Victorian country town of Ararat, a project called Digital Twin Victoria is being trialed to assist farms and track and respond to local weather conditions. 

The technology pairs Digital Twin Victoria with other smart farming technologies to create local weather maps with more site-specific details to deliver advice on sowing and harvest times.

A quick look around the world also shows other examples. In Spain, the Aragon Engineering Research Institute uses twinning to assist firstly in producing pistachio nuts and then almond trees.

Underwater, a Scottish startup, Tritonia Scientific, is trialing twinning technology to help drive more sustainable aquaculture. It combines underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) with above-water GPS technology and acoustic transponders to capture digital images of the seabed, which help to assess fish farms. 

Global giant Siemens also has a project, and earlier this year, announced the launch of Nemo’s Garden, perhaps the most innovative agritech startup which uses twinning technology to help in the sustainable underwater cultivation of crops.

The key innovation of Nemo’s Garden is not just twinning but a biosphere, a type of underwater greenhouse. It harnesses environmental features such as temperature stability, evaporative water generation, CO2 absorption, and an abundance of oxygen to create an environment ideal for crop cultivation but below the surface. 

Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].

Image credit: iStockphoto/Kamada Kaori