EU Commissioner Phil Hogan visited Tyndall yesterday and received a demonstration of Tyndall’s “small smart farm” in operation. Tyndall’s ‘small smart farm’ is a new project by Mariusz Wilk, a CONNECT Centre PhD candidate at Tyndall National Institute funded by Science Foundation Ireland. In Tyndall as part of CONNECT we are developing the “Smart things” which communicate sensed data to the cloud to enable informed decision making about the world around us and how we interact with it.
A group in Tyndall in Cork is leading the development of new nano technology based sensors and integrating them into the next generation internet.
This is one example of the ’Internet of things’ in operation in an Agricultural setting – The “internet of Farms”. Our “small smart farm” takes live data from all over the farm and we want to use the information to make all sorts of decisions. We are focusing today on soil temperature, PH, moisture content …. future technology being developed at Tyndall will look at phosphate and nitrate levels in soil and tell you if/when you need to fertilise your pasture, and with how much.
This will enable farmers of the future to operate their farms in a more cost effective and optimised fashion – the phrase used is “precision Agriculture” and technology like this will enable significant cost savings and quality improvements to farmers around their farming operations.
We continue to develop and integrate all kinds of new farm-useful sensors based on discussions with many stakeholders including UCC plant science Dept and Teagasc.
Tyndall “precision agriculture” technology will be showcased in the SFI, Teagasc and EI tents at the National ploughing champions later this month. Commissioner Hogan was “very engaged and very satisfied” with the demonstration and we anticipate such engagement expanding in the near future as awareness of the Tyndall precision agriculture offerings are communicated externally.
