South Australian farm satellite technology firm, Myriota, has teamed up with prominent water pump brand, Davey Water Products, to start monitoring remote tank water levels on a mass scale.
The partnership will see Myriota’s strategic low cost internet connectivity technology linked with Davey’s TankSense product range, enabling farmers to receive water level data direct to their mobile phones.
The new product will be the first mass market water-level sensor connected via Myriota’s earth-to-satellite transmission technology.
Farmers will be able to remotely monitor water usage and livestock water supplies from their homestead or anywhere they can receive mobile phone reception via the link with a satellite, about the size of a wine bottle, circling 550 kilometres above Earth.
Myriota launched its latest generation technology into space on the SpaceQuest BRIO nanosatellite in December.
It enables two-way transmissions between ground-based micro-transmitters and low Earth orbit nanosatellites using narrow, low cost bandwidths.
This partnership will lower water management costs in locations which until now have had no cost effective way of retrieving data.
- Alex Grant, Myriota
Myriota has capability to collect data from many millions of small internet of things (IoT) devices globally, including water sensors, moisture meters, moving vehicles, livestock tracking devices and ocean water temperature monitors use to improve weather forecasting.
The new water sensors, costing about $1000, each will be mounted on tanks in paddocks transmitting about 20 bytes of data direct to the satellite four times a day.
Davey’s new sensors are expected to go on sale in the second half of this year.
Myriota chief executive officer, Dr Alex Grant, said the Davey partnership would deliver real benefit for farmers who previously faced exorbitant costs for satellite connectivity or struggled to reliably monitor their water systems via existing radio or landline-linked devices.
Alternatively they currently rely on time consuming manual inspections, often involving hours of paddock driving or aerial inspections.
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“Our technology removes the need for farmers to rely on cellular networks with patchy coverage, or spend large sums of money to connect to high cost satellites,” he said.
“This partnership will lower water management costs in locations which until now have had no cost effective way of retrieving data.”
The company expects its “game changing” real time data service to cost farmers as little as “a few dollars a month”.
“Until now the internet of things has had a major connectivity problem with hundreds of millions of devices that need to communicate but no cost-effective, battery-friendly networks to do so – Myriota solved this problem,” he said.
Davey’s sensors have been bolstered by an inbuilt artificial intelligence capability which uses algorithms to bolster the accuracy of predictions around when a tank will run out of water.
Its innovation general manager, Joel Gresham, said combining TankSense with Myriota’s technology provided a world first in terms of communicating with regional locations.
“Thanks to this Myriota satellite technology, farmers who traditionally needed to manually check their tanks will be able to monitor their assets seamlessly from any location,” he said.
Myriota’s shareholder base includes Australian venture capital firms Main Sequence Ventures and Blue Sky Venture Capital, Boeing HorizonX Ventures; Singaporean telecommunications giant, Singtel.
Last year the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) began deploying marine drifters with Myriota’s purpose-built satellite connected sensors, which record around 160 bytes of data a day in oceans around Australia.
AIMS’ data tracks currents, sea surface water temperatures and barometric pressure.
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Andrew Marshall
Andrew Marshall is the group agribusiness writer for ACM's state agricultural weeklies and websites. He is a former editor at The Land and has worked in various Rural Press group roles in Canberra, North Richmond (NSW) and Toowoomba (Qld).
Andrew Marshall is the group agribusiness writer for ACM's state agricultural weeklies and websites. He is a former editor at The Land and has worked in various Rural Press group roles in Canberra, North Richmond (NSW) and Toowoomba (Qld).
