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Agribusiness
100% Coverage, Two Weeks Ahead of Schedule: How Gleeson Farms Connected 18,000 Hectares
Tim Gleeson, Managing Director, Gleeson Farms, Australia
Gleeson Farms is an 18,000-hectare, second-generation broadacre operation in the arid landscape of Northern Victoria. Sporadic connectivity, a genuine black spot, was blocking the farm's precision agriculture goals, including variable rate mapping, data casting, and machine linking across seeding and spraying, and ruled out ambitions like autonomous machinery and weather-station-guided spray drift prevention.
▶ Watch Tim's story (2:59)
Connected Farms deployed a multi-pronged solution: a private 4G network tower providing coverage across the full 18,000 hectares, plus Low Earth Orbit (LEO) technology giving individual machines a high-speed Wi-Fi bubble wherever they're working, connecting each machine back to the main office in real time.
“We have noticed a marked difference in the operational side of things, saving so much time in loading maps,” says Tim Gleeson, Managing Director.
Coverage reached 100% across the property, seeding finished two weeks ahead of schedule, and real-time data casting let operators fine-tune seeding and spraying runs before leaving the paddock. Weather-station-linked spray drift stop controls, once out of reach without reliable connectivity, are now running.
“Every business looks for incremental gains, and essentially with technology that works, the level of frustration drops... We have been very happy with our relationship with Connected Farms and the technology keeps on proving itself,” Gleeson says.
Transcript
I’m Tim Gleeson, Managing Director of Gleeson Farms in the valley near Swan Hill in Victoria. I’m a second-generation farmer, farming here with my brother and our wives. The farm is 18,000 hectares, which we farm intensively as a cropping operation, with a little bit of opportunistic livestock fattening, but it is primarily a cropping property.
Satellite-on-the-Move was initiated for us this year, and we’ve noticed a marked difference on the operational side of things, especially in saving so much time loading maps.
We use DataCast on our machines to identify where the other machine is and what has been seeded in the paddock. We can go back through the maps and see what has been done and what has not been done, and all of that information is much more readily available because of having Satellite-on-the-Move.
What we have had an issue with in the past is connectivity, particularly internet data transfer. When we go into a new field, we need to load maps, and if we do not have connectivity to an internet source, we can spend hours trying to load them. We also need to connect to the tractor to allow DataCast to work.
Satellite-on-the-Move helps with the seeding program because we can see where the other machine is, and both machines can see each other’s location, where they have been and where they still need to seed. They can also see where to drop runs or fill in runs. Satellite-on-the-Move has been basically instantaneous, and it has been an absolute game changer.
In the past, it has been frustrating to sit in a field, or have to go to the top of a hill or another area with better signal, and wait for a map or other information to load. In particular areas of the farm, it has been an absolute nightmare. This year, with Satellite-on-the-Move, connectivity has been much more seamless.
In the spraying area, it is a similar situation. We need maps for fields to be sprayed and herbicides to be applied in a particular way. Similar to seeding, we use a lot of variable maps, including variable maps for nitrogen applications across our fields.
We have been very happy with our relationship with Connected Farms, and the technology keeps proving itself. Every business looks for incremental gains, and with technology that works, the level of frustration drops. We can do things more seamlessly, and those psychological benefits, as well as the practical benefits, all contribute to our ability to execute what we need to execute in a more timely and efficient manner.
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