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DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
has now encouraged many more industries to be mapped in Aus- tralia as well as other countries, it has achieved the glorious status of Agriculture 4.0. For yield forecasting, I am still perplexed on how growers are supposed to navigate all the tech- nologies, understand how to use them effectively “off the shelf” and how to integrate them into the farming system. No wonder the bird has anxiety. In order to find the best solutions, the extended team assessed space, airborne, and ground based sensors including hyperspectral, multispec- tral, thermal, and LiDAR for accur- acies and practicalities of use. Here are some main findings and observations: From the very outset there was no infor- mation on how best to acquire drone imagery of tree crops
ment through mobile and web based Apps and ground truth- ing. The mapping of tree crops was a major achievement for digitally empowering a num- ber of industries by delivering essential base line data that provided an accurate measure of current industry size and an- nual change, informs decisions around labour, infrastructure, traceability, forward selling, and improved preparedness and re- sponse to natural disasters and biosecurity threats. The freely available map has been adopted directly on each industries web- site to assist grower engage- ment as well has been used by ABARES, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Harvest trail, and the Murray Darling Basin Au- thority. This successful integra- tion of Agtech and industry need
everything at these two needs including satellites, drones, air- planes, robots, ML/AI, MobileApps, hyperspectral, multispectral, ther- mal, LiDAR, carrier pigeons. There was also the opportunity to bring together a strong collaboration of expertise from industry, univer- sity, government departments of primary industry and commercial developers. With all that engage- ment, testing and validation there were some wins that have been adopted and continue to grow. The Australian Tree Crop Map Dashboard which identifies the location and area of all avo- cado, mango, macadamia, cit- rus, olive, and banana orchards nationally was developed using an integration of remote sens- ing (aerial and satellite), the digitisation of existing industry data, citizen science engage-
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