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How Smart Farming with Digital Technologies can help you – Audio 1

 

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Hi there and welcome to this series of audio presentations. My name is Malinda from Mini Robotic Technologies. In today’s audio series, I’m going to be teaching you about the PEM Framework. This is a different way to approach your farming problems, and allow for you to find different ways to open up your farming methods to smart farming implementations. Why would you even want to do this? Well, by adopting Smart Farming principles, you enable a higher-level of productivity as well as a potential for higher profitability.

About me

So who am I, and why am I qualified to teach you about this? Well,I am a farmer from an IT background. one of my specialties is teaching technical things to non-technical people. I am also a Permaculture designer. Permaculture means that I look at how to generate the most output from your input, while reducing the amount of energy that you use in your input. Now today, I want to teach you the first part of my PEM Smart Farming model. PEM in this case, stands for Preventative, Emergency, and Monitoring. For today’s part, we’re going to look at the preventative side of things. I’m going to start by telling you the story that we had with our chickens. So we were fairly new to farming, and we had taken up chicken farming. We had a great customer base! Things were going pretty well. But it was spring in an area that we don’t know very well, and we had a cold snap one night. To top it the actual power in the chicken house tripped, as well.

So, the next morning we discover that we had lost 70% of our chicks . This means we lost the business from the chef. So, this PEM Framework can be applied to the problems that we faced here. In order to apply the PEM framework to a problem, you need to first look at the base level of your farming operations. It’s looking at your primary income makers, working out what their primary needs actually are, and looking at your farming processes. What’s the basic infrastructure that you need to run your operation? Everything hinges on this.

Analyze basic needs

SO let’s take this chicken story as an example .Chickens have basic needs:

• accommodation
• water
• heating
• cooling
• to be draft free
• good food
• clean bedding etc

Now this in turn, point to the needs behind that.

Whats needed to produce the needs

So the chicken needs water :

• that means you need a holding tank for the water
• and you need a water source
• and a means of getting the water from the source to the chicken

What about heating ?

• There is a need for a heating device usually we use heating lamps
• this in turn has to be powered somehow. Be it from electricity or liquid, fuel or gas and
• you also need to know when to switch it on you need to understand when there’s been a change in temperatures.

Now both of those ..say, wouldn’t that be amazing if you were actually able to monitor the water levels in your tank and monitor the temperature of the house? But, more about that later

So another need that is pointed to here is cooling.

• you need to have air openings be it Windows or flaps
• and you might need to actually make the air flow. You might need something like a fans
• which in turn may need a power source such as electricity or gas generator .

Now in the PEM framework you’ve now listed the basic needs of the chickens, and you’ve delved a little bit deeper in , to say what is the line that actually produces that need. It’s all about ensuring that you have the basic infrastructure in place to run the operations under normal circumstances. In order to do this, like Ive said, the first thing is the brainstorming as we’ve just done.

Create an Item inventory

Now you list what the items are (that you need), based on the brainstorming, in order to achieve this. You can hold a meeting with you staff, at this stage, and do a stock check to find out which of these items you do or don’t yet have. Create a table of results for the next step.

Lets review

• You’ve looked at the Essential needs for your operation.
• You’ve then delved deeper in to each of these need to see what’s behind it that actually produces,
• and then you are sitting with your staff, and doing an asset check to see if you even have any of these items.

Taking preventative action

Now, in order to delve a little bit deeper into the preventive side, you need to look at what problems have occurred in the past or that you might anticipate in the future. Ask yourself, in each event, what caused that or why did that occur. Let’s take the chicken example. So we lost 70% of our chickens that morning. Lets imagine I’m sitting in a staff meeting and this was the discussion:”

Sorry folks we lost 70% of our chickens this morning

Now you start to apply the questions:

Well what caused that ? We had a cold snap last night. What caused that? The weather. But why did they get cold ? The heating lamp failed. So what caused that? The power to the chicken house tripped. Ooo, well what caused that? Nobody knows ! Alright let go have a look and see if we can find what caused the power to trip ….

On inspection, you discover that the cable to the heating lamp is broken. It’s actually got bare cabling, and it is lying in some puddle of water inside the chicken house!

So what cause the brake in the cable ? Oh everyone knows that, the rats did that! So why did that occur ? Well the cables are actually lying bare right on the ground level …

If you analyze this problem, in this manner, you’ll get a greater understanding of where the faults are in your system. Now you can ask yourself, how you could prevent this from happening again. As you’ve run the problem down, all the way from beginning to the source, you can evaluate your options from the source level all the way back up! To find a way to prevent this from happening again, don’t just stop at the first level. Go all the way up !

Preventative problem solving

So let’s do that! With this example, we’ve discovered that the cables were bare

What can we do? We could redo the cabling into conduit.

But the rats ate it! Are there any chicken friendly rat traps you can install ?

and the cable got wet ! Well, if we put the cable in conduit, that’s well secured high up on the chicken house it will prevent the sagging cable reaching water!

so the power tripped ! There’s no backup power here what could we do about that ?

Here you could investigate options such as a generator or older methods of providing electricity or newer methods of providing electricity

imagine being able to monitor whether the electrical supply is actually up or down ….that would make life a lot easier

oh yes well let’s get back to the discussion….

The heating lamp failed ! Do we carry spare lamps did it actually fail or is it still working but it actually just needed a cable that was not chewed through

next step up

It was cold last night ! Where we even aware that a cold front was coming! Could someone check the weather forecast every morning and how accurate would that be?

Once again imagine being able to monitor whether the temperature is dropping or climbing at any time!

From this you are now able to build a plan of action that can be implemented uring the a day or week ahead

Build a plan of action

Here is an example of a plan of action

• go and buy conduit with saddles
• remounted chicken heating lamp and the lightning in the conduit
• and make sure that all the conduit is mounted with saddles high up off the ground
• purchase some chicken friendly rat traps and
• place them in strategic locations away from the chicken please
• put the generator under a roof next door to the chicken house
• ensure that you have extension cords so that swapping over to the generator will be quick
• always restock the heating lamps so that we always have 6 in stock
• one or two people get the job of checking the weather forecast every day before 9 a.m.
• and reporting to the farmer if any bad weather is expected

There you have it ! We’ve climbed all the way back up that list that we made from asking questions.

Continued education

Now, the final part of this would be to ensure that your staff and yourself understand the basic needs of the stock items, that is, your main produce on your farm. For example chickens have different feeding and heat requirements at different ages . Are your staff aware of this? It’ll be an ongoing educational program to ensure everyone is on the same page when it comes to the primary outputs that generate the income on your farm I mentioned earlier about being able to monitor water power and temperature We’re actually using such systems at the moment and they’re super powerful and takes so much less effort…. But I’ll tell you more about those in the next audio.

In Summary – Simple but Powerful

So to summarize: The first part of a PEM Framework is the Preventative side

• This is where you list the needs of the stock or produce that you produce .
• You then analyzed each need further down.
• Then, in conjunction with your staff, you asked the questions around old problems or futuristic problems that haven’t occurred yet .
• Questions asked: what caused that and why did that occur
• You run the problem down until you find the source of the problem
• Once you’ve done that you need to go back up the list and analyse what it is you can do to prevent that particular thing from happening again
• Once you’ve implemented all of those items, that you have found,from your plan of action, you will have greatly reduced the likelihood of that event from happening again!!

As a thank you for taking the time to listen to this audio, tomorrow I will be sending out a worksheet which summarizes this preventative process, and can help you apply it to your own farming process. So keep an eye on your inbox. The next audio lesson will follow in 2 days time. Thank you for taking the time to listen. I hope you’ve benefited from this . We’ll see you in the next session

Please Add your comments below

I really hope you found something useful to implement or think about in this audio. I would really love to hear from you. What crazy stories do you have to share from your farming experience? How did you overcome them. ? On that note, what other problems , as a farmer are you facing? Farming is such a broad topic with so many facets ! I would love to here from you blow in the comments section about the issues your tackling on a daily basis.What problems do you currently face that you are over whelmed by ? Please add your comments below. Look out for my next FREE audio, in 2 days time! Here’s to farmers and the amazing job you do ! Sincerely Malinda PS: If you would like more information on what was discussed in this video, please contact me at info@minirobotech.com