Llanelli Farm

Llanelli is a 526 hectares family farm located in Bathurst, NSW. With its 1,500 head of sheep, the farm primarily targets the lamb market. The owner recognised early on that taking the path of digital transformation was the best approach to tackle their challenges and reduce their operational costs.

Llanelli faced two main challenges in the daily management of their business, livestock tracking and water management. Every single animal needed to be counted and managed manually once a month, a lengthy and tedious process prone to human error.

Additionally, with 11 dams and three water tanks spread across a 526 hectare mountainous land, Llanelli’s staff lost a sizeable amount of time travelling to each dam and tank to verify water levels and action the appropriate measures. Since water is the most important element on a farm, the staff at the family-owned farm had to perform water checks daily, even multiple times a day during extreme dry seasions and draughts. Llanelli chose Outcomex to design and implement an IoT solution that would help them solve those two problems.

Through combining IoT and Enterprise Networking products, IoT sensors, and Farmdeck, an all-in-one IoT Farm Management Solution, Outcomex enabled Llanelli to track and identify livestock, manage water tanks and dams levels, and surveillance the perimeter of the property all from the Farmdeck app.

Due to the complexity of the landscape, three different wireless technologies were deployed; one for the livestock management, one for the cameras, and one for field sensors management. Surveillance cameras were also installed on the field to provide analytics on the sheep movements and give the owners visibility to everything happening on their land.

One of the key differentiators of this solution is the distance within which the RFID reader can track the livestock. To increase the tracking distance to 8m and get a more accurate sheep count, we developed the first high frequency sheep tags in Australia. This helped the Llanelli team to save time and reduce human error as they did not have to manually scan sheep ear tags anymore. Instead, a tag reader was installed on the paddocks’ gates, capturing all the animals going through.

Outcomex easily and economically deployed this wireless monitoring solution through IoT sensors in dams and tanks to address issues related to water management. With their low-power operation, extended battery life, and strong signal range in rural areas, these IoT sensors were perfect for Llanelli’s IoT project. All data generated through those sensors are then aggregated on Outcomex’s Farmdeck portal, forming the ultimate Smart Farm – helping Llanelli to increase efficiency and sustainability while remaining competitive.

By providing access to data and analytics for water (levels, leaks, volumes and usage) and livestock (track, count and identification), Outcomex has enabled the Bathurst farm to proactively address their many challenges, such as drought preparation, tank damage, stray livestock, and budget constraints.

Using IoT has helped Llanelli to streamline their processes, provide valuable data, improve analytics and shorten their time to action. To make sense of all the data, Farmdeck has provided them with a user-friendly interface consolidating all the information collected by the sensors and cameras on the farm.

Ben Morgan, Co-owner, Llanelli Farm:

Farmdeck provides an end-to-end IoT solution to help farmers track and identify livestock, manage water tanks and dams levels and surveillance the perimeter of the property. The complete IoT farm management platform, designed by Outcomex, enables farmers to view the data anywhere and at anytime.