Trialling New Technologies for the Australian Dairy Industry in Victoria

7 November 2012

Since January 2012, the Centre for eCommerce and Communications (CeCC) at the University of Ballarat has been working closely with Dairy Innovation Australia Limited (DIAL) to develop a spatial application for its milk production database, called C-Milk.

During this time, CeCC has developed an on-line spatial application to visualise dairy production per region and dairy industry location. The dairy industry in Australia collects enormous quantities of data across all levels of dairy production, from milk quality and yield of individual cows and farms, to meteorological information tracking temperature, rainfall and humidity. In 2009, DIAL began to develop an integrated data platform, web application and dynamic query tool to make the data accessible to the industry. It is the richness and depth of the Victorian dairy industry data that makes it so well-suited to spatial representation.

The data used in this prototype consisted of milk, protein and fat production levels for dairy producing regions. Alongside the production data, a random set of 6,000 dairy farms across Australia was generated to bench-test performance.

The outcome of this project is an application where users can visually explore aggregated regional production data, allowing for identification of trends and anomalies in dairy production data. The application offers users – especially dairy farmers, and farming and industry consultants –the advantage of accessing spatial information from any location, using advanced technology applications together with new broadband initiatives.

This collaborative project has been an important milestone for DIAL as it seeks to advance industry productivity, sustainability and competitiveness using innovative technologies. The Victorian dairy industry is a substantial contributor to the State’s economy with over 5,000 dairy farms in Victoria accounting for 65% of Australia’s overall milk production. CeCC is pleased to have contributed to this important project and believes there is much potential for the industry as it builds capacity into the future.