Digital Homestead

Our Digital Homestead project at Charters Towers’ Spyglass cattle station is creating more efficient and profitable cattle farms through sensor technology. This project combines remote sensors and monitoring, data analytics and rural connectivity technology to help farmers collect real-time information about cattle behaviour, weather, pasture performance, grazing capacity and market conditions.

One of systems, Walk Over Weighing, is improving farm efficiency by allowing farmers to weigh their animals remotely on a daily basis. This provides better tracking of the health of a herd and allows for the detailed monitoring of behavioural changes. For instance, if cattle are not visiting the weighing stations, it may indicate the presence of alternative water sources or an individual animal suffering an illness.

The data from the property is automatically aggregated for presentation on a user-friendly digital dashboard. Farm managers can see real-time statistics relating to cattle locations, cattle weight trends and remaining tank water as well as environmental data, such as climate and weather reports.