Digitising an Agricultural College
“It’s great to be working with a partner like INCYT who understands our needs and makes sure we keep everything performing at the level where we need it to be at all times.”
Business Type: Agricultural Education
Produces: Cattle, Sheep, Broadacre Crops
Size: 1,100 hectares
Longerenong Agricultural College needed a way to incorporate the latest agtech and ag data management into their curriculum whilst also needing this same data for the farm manager to help inform the on-farm decision making processes.
In 2022 the decision was made to find and adopt a full-scale on-farm monitoring system that encompasses all commercially available in-field sensors and trackers, and that can feed all this data back to one central dashboard. After scoping out a range of different agtech providers, the decision was made to partner with INCYT.
With over 150 INCYT sensors and trackers deployed at the agricultural college, the farm managers, teachers and students now all have access to one complete dashboard with a comprehensive digital overview of the farm. This helps the farm managers inform their decision making processes and teaches students the possibilities that agtech offers farmers in a range of different scenarios.
AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION SINCE 1889
Longerenong Agricultural College in Western Victoria teaches over 70 full-time students per year in a range of different courses from a Certificate III in Agriculture all the way through to an Advanced Diploma in Agribusiness Management. Students can take courses in fields such as general agriculture, wool classing, agronomy or agribusiness just to name a few, and learn many other skills that are invaluable in today’s farming operation.
In order to teach these valuable skills to students, Longerenong college boasts a 1,100 hectare farm that comprises a livestock operation with both sheep and cattle, and a cropping operation that grows a range of dryland crops such as wheat, barley, canola, lentils and chickpeas. Large agricultural supply companies such as Bayer, BASF and AGT also run a variety of trials and seed-increase plots at Longerenong to help with their product development pipeline.
Longerenong college has been in operation since 1889, but remaining a leader in the field and adopting new technologies to showcase to students and help manage the farm, is a high priority for Longerenong College General Manager Jacinta Langdon and her team, she says: “Our vision is to incorporate agtech and ag data into the courses we deliver to our students so they are exposed to this data as much as possible and they are able to use and analyse it in their studies as well.”
ADOPTING INCYT
In 2022 Longerenong College decided to adopt agtech across their farm and implement as many different monitoring systems as possible, both to help with all aspects of managing the farm, but also to show students all the different options that are available when investing in agtech. The team had a preference for only working with one supplier for all on-farm monitoring, so that the data from all individual sensors could easily be centralised, and so the decision was made to partner with INCYT. Jacinta explains: “Our team worked together with INCYT to decide which sensors and trackers we wanted, and where to install them. This resulted in a detailed farm monitoring plan for the initial deployment, and we’ve been adding even more sensors to this plan since that time.”
Jacinta continues: “From soil moisture probes to weather stations, inversion towers, diesel tank level sensors, water tank level sensors and much more, we now have in excess of 150 sensors deployed across the farm. The INCYT team have been great to work with right from the start, and even now we still have our monthly check-in calls to work though how all sensors are performing and where improvements can be made. With such a large-scale deployment of sensors it’s important to keep a close eye on everything to make sure that none of the sensors have gone offline or are damaged, and the INCYT team is doing a great job in working closely with our team on this.”
“We also have an INCYT field technician come out to our farm regularly to check the sensors and calibrate them where necessary; because we’re an agricultural college our standards and needs for our on-farm monitoring program are a lot more stringent than on ‘normal’ farms. It’s great to be working with a partner like INCYT who understands our needs and makes sure we keep everything performing at the level where we need it to be at all times.”
LEVERAGING IN-FIELD DATA
Like every other educational institute, Longerenong College has a constant focus on balancing the different parts of their curriculum to ensure that the graduates’ skills match the needs of the industry. Jacinta: “We always listen to the experts and keep a broad view on agriculture as it moves into the future. There are some overarching themes like on-farm safety and sustainability that are so important in the industry right now that we want to make sure our students are appropriately skilled in those areas. Technology and data both play a big role ensuring on-farm safety and helping farms become more sustainable, so we see technology like INCYT’s monitoring system as important technology that underpins our curriculum, but we still give our students plenty of time for ‘boots on the ground’ as well to make sure that we deliver a balanced education.”
Jacinta adds: “Agtech and the data resulting from it is a really valuable tool for us and sometimes it sparks an interest from a student that they didn’t know they had previously. They might think that they’re just going to drive tractors for the rest of their lives but then, when they see the data and technology associated with the tractor, it can spark an interest they didn’t know they had. We get students coming from farms that have already adopted a lot of agtech, but we also get students from farms that have not really adopted any agtech at all yet. With INCYT’s equipment deployed on our farm we have the capability to give every student the same exposure to agtech, irrespective of how much they’ve been exposed to it previously, and peak their interest.”
Asked about how else Longerenong College might leverage the data from INCYT’s sensors and trackers in future, Jacinta has many ideas to share: “We’ve got a big push on developing short courses for people that are already in the industry but that might not be as proficient in agtech as they would like to be. These people also tend to be time-poor, and so there’s a great opportunity for us to create bite-size courses, not necessarily for accreditation purposes, but more for knowledge sharing and education. You can think about learning how to analyse soil moisture data, to learning how to look at business management from an agtech perspective or optimising animal nutrition, the opportunities are endless. But for us to be able to offer any of these courses we first need to make sure we have adopted solid technology from the right provider first, and with INCYT we’ve surely done that.”