Business View Oceania - Oct 2023

10 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA VOLUME 5, ISSUE 10 say are early adopters, but we’re fantastic at dealing with crises. We are late to the table, but then we move like greased lightning,” Zeichner says. “I’d like to bypass that and do a bit more planning and a bit more leadership, a bit more ‘putting out there’ earlier.” To do so, the IoTAA operates eight different workstreams that break down the needs of individual sectoral domains, including food and agriculture, smart cities, water, energy, manufacturing, transportation, health and construction. Zeichner cites the example of measuring lettuce leaf wetness as a solution identified in the food and agriculture workstream. If a retailer requests 1000 heads of lettuce from its supplier, it will just get 1000 heads of lettuce at random. However, depending on how wet the leaves were when they were picked, those same 1000 heads of lettuce could end up rotten by the time they hit the shelves. He explains, “So don’t say 1000 lettuces, say 1000 lettuces that will last two weeks minimum on the shelf, and that means you have to measure how wet the leaf is. That will reduce wastage in the journey to the shelf and eventually home and less food will end up in the bin.” It’s a really simple case of having data about the products. Zeichner notes, “It’s used through retail, it’s used through distribution, it’s used at the farm and that’s an end-to-end thing you can do with IoT. So the farmers that do that are preferred as the place to go because the retailers now know that they can get lettuce that will last longer, and farmers know they’re not picking stuff that’s going to be wasted. It saves on wastage, cost, and everything else.” IoTAA has five “enabler” workstreams that break down into collaboration, data use, cybersecurity, interoperability, and start-ups. Each one of the sectoral workstreams has its own use cases for which the Internet of Things technology IoT is transforming the Australian food and agribusiness sector. IoTAA member, Goanna Ag’s GoField Plus monitors crop stress levels, measures and forecasts water use and identifies optimum time to maximise yield from applied irrigations. Image courtesy of Goanna Ag.