Frost and Heat Risk Mitigation
for the Grains Sector

Challenge

Yield loss from frost and heat events in wheat alone is estimated to cost Australian grain growers more than A$500m annually. These events are difficult to predict and quantify, posing challenges for many industry players from insurance to the growers themselves.
 
Growers need to make informed planting decisions prior to the season, including when to sow, what to sow and where to sow to help mitigate climate risk. Furthermore, if they’re impacted by a mid-season frost or heat event, they should be able to use data to make economically informed decisions on the outcome of the crop; growers can only do this if they understand the full implications and potential yield loss of frost and heat events.
 
These challenges require fit-for-purpose data sets to be interrogated together to provide near real-time high resolution analytics to help growers manage the impacts of frost and heat. These analytics also need to be readily accessible on one platform, and easy to use and interpret.

Solution

Eratos is a Data Infrastructure Platform solving the way organisations and individuals make informed decisions about the world we live in. Eratos makes finding and accessing disparate data at scale effortless, with interoperability and reusability built into its DNA.

 

Eratos does this through three products:

• a data infrastructure platform to make any dataset available in situ (PaaS);

• a developer environment for Creators to build models, workflows and applications (SaaS); and,

• a marketplace to publish and share scalable solutions built on top of the platform.

 

On Eratos, you can access, build, collaborate and share data, models and solutions. Particular focus to date has been on research, education, federal and state government, agriculture, financial services and smart cities.  

 

A collection of relevant, isolated and disparate data sets and research models have been assembled onto the Eratos platform and, using Senaps (more below), workflows were constructed to operationalise climate risk mitigation solutions.

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The land surface temperature (LST) satellite, Himawari, provides topographical temperature mapping of Australia at a paddock-level resolution. This highly complex and valuable data feed has been made available to the project via the Eratos platform. Third-party partners are then able to use the Himawari solution to build applications on top of the Eratos platform for products such as insurance, farm management and data integration workflows 

 

Models and Machine Learning are incorporated into the solution to provide practical use cases to maximise the ability for growers and industry partners to make informed decisions for specific locations at scale. These models and machine learning algorithms are built, hosted and powered by Eratos.

Results and Benefits

 

• Primary producers receive real-time notifications of frost and heat events at a paddock level.

• Improve grower profit via improved decision making on frost and heat risk management.

• Mitigate the economic loss from frost and heat events.

• Federated access to data and models creates more opportunities to solve more complex problems.

• New product development to enable 3rd party developers to build more solutions at scale.