A Digital Twin for Grassland Management

Abstract

Informed grassland management is essential for cost-effective pasture based livestock farming, environmental sustainability and land use efficiency. To support these goals, this paper investigates the feasibility of a Digital Twin for grassland management, with the goal of providing improved decision-support through simulation based estimation and data availability. The Digital Twin provides a novel means to achieve digitization, with several examples found across a diverse range of agricultural enterprises. However, current examples of the Digital Twin have failed to outline a clear and coherent blueprint to aid the general development of the Digital Twin in agricultural applications. Therefore, this paper explores and presents a proof-of-concept modular service based architecture, utilizing a pre-existing technology stack and a reusable modular design to develop a Digital Twin for grassland, something which has been overlooked in state-of-the-art examples. Compared to existing Digital Twins in agriculture, this solution provides a simplistic approach to developing minimum-viable Digital Twins, supporting future applications of the concepts in the area of agriculture, while demonstrating a novel application in grassland.