In Tuesday’s R&D Daily, we reported about Australia’s use of telemetry to help manage scant water resources. In the process, farmers—or pastoralists as they are known in Australia—found themselves saving a sizable chunk of time and money.
Despite the challenges of using electrical devices in the wild Outback, where living things like to chew cables or build nests on cameras and temperatures can be brutal, the benefits have far outweighed the initial expense and subsequent maintenance costs.
Can such an approach work in the U.S., where dwindling water supplies appear to be a disaster in the making? I don’t see why we shouldn’t try. After all, most farming practices have taken a sharp turn toward automation. Chickens, of course, are carefully managed, even in “cage-free” settings. Dairy operations are automatic. Combines are wheeled factories. And anyone who has looked at a modern pig farm recently might be shocked to find it resembles a high-tech laboratory, down the white clean suits.
But automated free-range beef? I honestly didn’t think this would come to pass, but it’s working for the Australians, who already have several equipment suppliers who specialize in this sort of radio telemetry gear, including water flow gauges, solar-powered sensors for temperature and water readings, and remote cameras for visual checkups on water reservoirs (a very important QE for a pastoralist, I’ll bet).
