WA Farm Data Sharing

The Challenge:

Making timely and accurate decisions in the challenging Western Australian farming environment is critical to long term viability of this multi-billion-dollar sector. Data-supported decision making remains a complex and time-consuming process with farm managers often required to gather information from siloed data sources and then manually incorporate research, technology, and whole farm knowledge to reach a decision.

Automating the flow of on-farm data and providing accurate prediction models would minimise mistakes, reduce risks, improve resource use and efficiency across the business and provide more certainty for farmers in a constantly changing environment.  

The Solution:

This collaborative research project will help growers make more sophisticated investment decisions using their own data by developing a self-service web-based productivity reporting tool.

The project team, led by the Department of Primary Industries & Regional Development (DPIRD), the Grower Group Alliance (GGA) and Curtin University, will build the data exchange system and model using liming strategies as a test case. This framework has the potential to be used in future as the basis for other whole-farm models to inform decisions such as machinery purchases, infrastructure investments, agtech integration and genetics.

In addition to helping farmers make more confident decisions, these reports can also be presented to banks or insurers to increase the confidence in loans, negotiate improved interest rates or offer more realistic valuations of farmland.

Throughout the project, the project team will regularly engage with WA farmers to validate the model, as well as software and technology companies to test market viability.

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Stay up to date on the latest activities in this project with the Grower Group Alliance.