IN the throes of a busy seeding program, water trough monitoring can be put on the backburner.
But a scholarship winner has been trialling a way to ensure he can keep track of water availability through the simplicity of his phone.
A series of up to nine images per camera throughout the day allows Brinkworth farmer Bradley Wundke to check his water trough levels from anywhere on the farm.
And during summer, when the 500-ewe flock requires more water, traversing the property to make sure the troughs are full can cut into Bradley's cropping duties.
“I can be saving time checking troughs during hot periods when I need to be carting the grain to the silos or reaping at that time,” he said.
Mr Wundke, with his parents Dennis and Karen plus his brother Justin and his wife Beck, farm 2000 hectares of wheat, barley, lentils and export hay, alongside their Merino flock.
The camera roll-out came in time for summer last year after Bradley won one of five scholarships from Shepno.
The Mid North Young Gun scholarship aimed to benefit sheep producers by trialling and demonstrating innovative on-farm technology practices.
Bradley put forward the idea for water monitoring via remote mobile cameras and found the technology inception a success.
During summer, Bradley had two cameras set up on-farm, bought from a Clare distributor North-Comm.
Using a solar panelled 3G network and a sim card, images are emailed to the whole Wundke family or can be checked via a mobile phone app.
“It is not just for when you're in the house or working in the field,” Bradley said.
“If you are away for the weekend, you can check the troughs before you leave and while you are away on the app to make sure everything is working.”
It meant when Bradley was away for New Years, he was not reliant on neighbours stopping by to check on the troughs.
He said one of the most prevalent times to check the troughs was in the morning.
“You know whether you need to swing by the troughs on the way out before you start harvesting for the day or whether you can leave it until the evening,” he said.
“If sheep were hanging near the trough in the morning when they should have had a drink and gone away, that indicated something wasn't right.”
Bradley said the innovative technology would be helpful to farmers who had properties spread “all over the place”.
“When you have a farm block that’s 10 kilometres one way and another 5km in the other direction, it's a long time going about just to check that the water is flowing,” he said.
The Wundke family have farmed at Brinkworth for more than 100 years.
Remote camera benefits in focus
BRADLEY Wundke will discuss managing water troughs via a phone app at next week’s Managing Soils for Sheep information day in Manoora.
The Brinkworth producer and member of the Mid North Young Guns group will discuss the findings of a scholarship he used to investigate on-farm technology.
“It is a good opportunity to get this information back to the farmers,” Mr Wundke said.
The information session, starting at 8am on Thursday, June 28, will also feature discussions on understanding soil carbon and nitrogen by CSIRO presenter Jeff Baldock.
PIRSA’s Andrew Harding will discuss managing acid soils and Pasture Genetics’ Rehn Freebairn will talk about matching pasture to soils.