 My name is Tiffany Bennett. I'm a livestock consultant with Rural Solutions SA. We're here today at Felicity Turner's place. It's filled in the Upper South East of South Australia looking at leak detection units. The benefits and the opportunities that they can provide to producers. We'll also be talking to Shane Oster, a consultant with the Alpha Group based at Keith in South Australia. He'll be talking to us about the hardware and how the technology works. We're located at Field in the Upper South East and our annual rainfall is around about 480 mils but we farm predominantly on sandy soils. So we're a dry land farming system, loose and dominant pastures and some sort of unimproved felt based pastures across the farm as well. Predominantly run a traded drill purpose merino flock. We buy an older use and we mate to terminal size and every animal that's bred on the farm essentially heads off for meat production. We also adjust some cattle and we do trade cattle as well. That's more opportunity based depending on seasonal conditions. So we've got about 1,460 hectares here, so 3,600 acres that we farm. We generally try to mate down sort of 23 to 2,500 breeding use and we've got about 50 cow calf units on adjustments. So we will bring trading stock in or out depending on feed conditions. Our livestock system depends wholly and solely on SA mains water. The mains is about 6 or 7 kilometres for this trough. It has to travel by pipe quite a long way before it actually gets to this farm so we've got two farms that are side by side. We bought the farm in 2016 and in September 2016 we installed leak detection units on all those mains water metres largely because if we have a leak that the cost of that is to the businesses is massive. So we're paying about at the moment $3.41 a kilo litre. It only takes a leak of 1,000 litres and they're our type thing. If it's going undetected for a couple of months until we get next water bill the cost of that to the business is huge. Where the leak detection units have been invaluable to Mark and I is we both also work off farms and having the technology and the telemetry allows us every day to check where we're at. Every morning Mark gets a text to his phone that tells us what our maximum usage and minimum usage and total usage for each metre is and I'll get that as an email. So that's all part of our annual subscription for the telemetry unit. That measures from midnight to midnight. We've also got another safety net in place that for each water metre we can set a level that when it hits a certain litre for the day that we get an alert sent to our phone. And sometimes if you've got a bad leak we'll get that at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. It doesn't fully replace us checking waters on a hot day but we can remotely monitor essentially or roughly what our stock are drinking and track that and make sure for the weather conditions and the number of stock that we've got on each of those metres that things are stacking up. If it looks like they're not drinking enough and it's a hot day then we'll race out and check those troughs. Make sure that a float valve hasn't stuck up and just make sure that the stock have got water at all times. The genesis of leak detection in the Upper South-Eastern really in South Australia started with a project which was done by the Kurong Local Action Plan that identified that the cost of mains water was rising at a fairly rapid rate and producers were starting to really fill the pinch of the result of that. The basis around the system is essentially monitoring the flow as it goes through an SA water metre. So this is one of the styles of SA water metres that's quite common and this is the pulse lead that we use to attach to it. And each time the little needle spins around it represents one litre of water and the pulse lead will pick up on that. We just click that into place and that's located with a screw in the centre or another unit which is the same as this. So this is the alternative style of metre that SA water uses. As you can see there's a hole in the back here which is usually covered by a little black plug and to take readings from that all we need to do is to insert the pulse lead in there, secure it with a screw provided and that'll provide an electronic pulse for us every time it clicks over 5 litres of water used. So the telemetry units that we use have a 5 watt solar panel which is more than enough power that we need. Generally it'll go back to full charge within a couple of hours of sunlight. The telemetry units that we use are supplied from a company called WildEye. They're based out of New Zealand. All of the units that we supply have the capacity for SDI-12 input which means that we can add in soil moisture probes, weather stations, multiple temperature sensors if we need to and we can also have rain gauges. It's a simple tipping bucket mechanism. Each time the bucket tips it will record 0.2 millimetres of rainfall and that can be calibrated if need be. Not only do they know what their water use has been but they can also pick up on rainfall events and how much rain they've had. Each morning when they get their text alert it'll tell them exactly how much rain they've got at the block. When it comes to monitoring borewater systems there's a couple of different ways that people go about providing water to their livestock. Generally speaking people will have maybe a bore or a solar pump and it will typically pump up to a header tank on top of a hill and then often it'll gravitate from there out to the rest of the farm. So what we're doing in that scenario is from the header tank on top of the hill we'll supply an aftermarket flow meter with pulse output capacity and then we can just link that into our telemetry unit and that essentially gives us exactly the same measurement as what we'll have from a standard leak detection unit. One of the add-ons which people really have embraced and enjoyed is the capacity to measure tank level as well. So we have two options with tank level. We can have a submersible tank level sensor like this. So all we do is simply drill a 30 mil hole in the top of the tank and we lower the transducer down to the bottom of the tank and essentially it's just an electronic pressure gauge which is measuring head of water in the tank. Alternatively we can have an external pressure gauge like this and use that as a tank level sensor. Another key part of the system is we'll also have another flow meter which will come in and measure the flow coming into the tank. Where that's really important is there's a lot of systems that will be on JTAR for example so they'll only come on at the night. So people are never there to see whether the pump's actually working and the first they know about the bore failing or the pump failing is that the tank level will drop. So if we're able to measure the water coming into the tank every day when people get their SMS they're actually able to determine did the bore go on last night and of course we'll typically not put the minimum flow on there because it switches off so it's always going to be zero. So we'll put the maximum flow and the important part about that is it actually gives us a capacity to monitor the health of the pump. It should be fairly consistent over time in that it should be able to pump 1500 litres per hour. If that starts dropping you know that you've got a problem with your pump or they're starting to get air or there may well be a leak in the line between the bore and the tank. So between two flow metres and a tank level sensor you really get all the information that you actually need to monitor the water system on your entire property. The tank level sensors are always come with alerts so we can set the alerts at whatever height we want. So for example we might set the first low level at a metre. Whatever time of day or night the tank gets to that metre of water it'll send SMS notifications to your phone or multiple phones saying that the back tank is below one metre. We can set another alert at half a metre and the important part about that is you may get your first notification and think yep I'll get to that but then when an hour later you get another one saying that it's a half a metre you go it's leaking pretty fast and I better get out there now. So we can set notifications to say that it's now above one metre so that you know if you've fixed the problem you know that your tank's filling again. We can set alerts to say that the tank's full so you may need to go and switch your windmill off or switch a manual pump system off. Farms around here typically might have 30 troughs and multiple tanks. The fundamental basis behind leak detection is that we'll be monitoring water constantly but generally between the hours of about midnight and six o'clock in the morning stock won't be drinking. Tanks are usually full, stock have had their drinks for the day and so if you haven't got any leaks in your system your consumption should get down to zero litres per hour. If your minimum is not zero you essentially know you have a leak so for example if you have a hundred litre per hour minimum you can quantify that you've got a hundred litre per hour leak. The systems have been extremely popular in SA which is largely based around the fact that we have quite a high cost per kilo litre compared to other states. People will find that if they save one major leak with one of these devices that will essentially pay for the capital costs and then there's about $200 per annum for the subscription and all of the small leaks that they pick up through the air quite comfortably cover that. Leak detection units are one part of the water telemetry technology on offer for livestock producers. Thank you to Felicity and Mark for telling us their story today.