The federal government has awarded three $50,000 seed funding grants to pilot projects that leverage DEA satellite data for agriculture analytics tools.
Senator Matt Canavan, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia, announced the successful applicants to the DEA Labs program on Friday.
“The value of this kind of technology to businesses is unlimited. It is through targeted collaborations like this that Australian innovation and ingenuity can shine a light on different parts of our economy,” he said.
“While the potential on-farm uses for this data is exciting, the reach of programs like Digital Earth Australia go far beyond the farm – think land-use, urban planning and water and resource management just to name a few.”
The winning entities are Brisbane-based Cibolabs, developing a decision support tool for red meat producers; Toowoomba-based DataFarming, building an app to automatically map paddock boundaries; and Perth-based NGIS Australia and Decipher, creating a pasture analytics tool.
FrontierSI (formerly CRCSI) and Geoscience Australia have been jointly developing Digital Earth Australia (DEA) over the past eight years, a national satellite imagery resource being constantly refined.
Earlier this year, FrontierSI launched DEA Labs, an incubator project to stimulate private sector uptake of DEA data.
Phil Delaney, Chief Innovation and Delivery Manager at FrontierSI, said: “We were blown away with the quality and range of projects we received during the open call. 33 innovative proposals came through covering a wide array of users from councils to multinational mining companies.”
“Ultimately, the three companies chosen are all tackling different problems from AI to data integration pipelines and serverless computing, but all are targeted at different users across the agricultural sector. We can’t wait to see the results, and get the feedback from their customers.”
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