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A computerised toolkit that helps drought-affected farmers manage water use has taken out the software design category at the World Imagine Cup finals in Paris this week.

Four students from four separate Australian universities earned the prize with their Smart Operational Agriculture toolkit (SOAK),a combination of hardware and software designed to help farmers better manage limited water resources.

They were also selected as one of six international teams to receive intense business and technology training as part of the Imagine Cup Innovation Accelerator program, co-sponsored by Microsoft and British Telecommunications plc (BT). This program will help them explore how their software could potentially turn into a business reality.

SOAK uses sensors around a farm that measure soil moisture, rainfall, wind, dam depth, temperature and water flow. It adds external data such as weather forecasts and combines it with crop lifecycle information to create a sophisticated watering system.

The toolkit controls farm sprinklers and prioritises water use where and when it’s needed. Farmers can be notified when a field reaches critical moisture level via SMS, and also when there is a critical irrigation failure such as a burst water main.

According to team member and recent Swinburne graduate Dimaz Pramudya, three of the group met during a Microsoft student program. They decided to enter the competition and each took on a specific role, collaborating electronically rather than working together at one university. A fourth member was drafted to do the graphic design and interface.

“We started by trying to define what problem would impact people the most,” Dimaz said. “Water conservation is a global problem and we discovered that agriculture accounts for 66 per cent of water usage.
“We spent over two months just interviewing ground staff and farm management to discover what sort of features and requirements they would need in an agriculture system. From there the system grew and grew until we came up with the final vision of SOAK.”

Now in its sixth year, the Microsoft-sponsored Imagine Cup is a competition for IT students to come up with a technology idea that’s innovative, that works and will change the world in some way. One hundred and twenty-four teams representing 61 countries competed in this year's competition.

Media contact: Lea Kivivali 0410 569 311