Su Ki Ooi
Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, The University of Melbourne

Agriculture is critical for food production and supporting regional economies. The efficiency of these systems plays an important role in the sustainable use of fresh water as well as improvement in productivity. Fortunately, the science behind state-of-the decision support has progressed to point where there are a plethora of models and computational methods available to the agribusiness community. These address almost every aspect of the supply chain, from cultivar selection, to irrigation, to transport optimization beyond the farm-gate. The challenge, however, is implementation, and this is a main roadblock to widespread adoption by farmers. The complexity inherently involved in on farm processes by necessity will require sophisticated software tools to help the farmer cope with this new regime. However, unless these tools are widely accessible and easy to use, they will not deliver to their full potential. Therefore, FarmNet; a software platform is being developed by the National ICT Australia (NICTA). The purpose of FarmNet is to make sophisticated decision support more widely accessible and easier to use for farmers and agricultural extension staff. FarmNet achieved this by, (i) providing an open (published) interface for sensors to upload their data to the FarmNet service, (ii) separating sensor data from models thereby making it easier to add or modify sensors and/or models in the future, as they are developed, and (iii) providing a uniform interface either delivered for either PC based browsers or mobile devices.