The farmers leading the Aussie agtech movement to automate ag
Andrew Bate is among a growing number of farmers who are flipping traditional farming on its head. Meet him and the other Aussies at the vanguard of the movement to automate agriculture.
CATCHING up with central Queensland grain grower Andrew Bate can be a difficult task.
“Sorry, he’s off in the paddock chasing robots,” says his wife and business partner, Jocie Bate, with a laugh.
It’s not a standard response – or one that would have ever been heard in Australia five years ago – but is quite normal when it comes to Andrew and Jocie Bate.
The young farming couple are the founders and majority owners of SwarmFarm Robotics, a trailblazing Australian agtech company near Emerald, Queensland, which has become one of the first in the world to develop and build agricultural robots that are now in full-scale commercial use.
Last month Swarm Farm raised $4.5 million from eager investors to boost its production from one farm robot a month to one a week, with more than 20 of the small, light autonomous robots now being used to spray weeds in wheat crops, mow turf and tidy up vineyards across Australia.
The Bates’ business already employs 17 young smart engineers, robotics, mechatronics and agronomic professionals – all aged under 30 – in its big tin shed and hi-tech business hub on the family farm at Gindie, 30km from Emerald. By next year, their “robot factory” is likely to have more than 50 staff.
Andrew hopes it will give both the nascent Australian agtech industry and the increasing digitalisation and technological sophistication of Australian agriculture a real boost.
Both are issues Andrew Bate, 42, is passionate about.
“Sometimes it seems like we’ve been talking about big data, analytics, remote sensing, drones, satellites, yield maps and automation for years, but it hasn’t really followed through down on the ground into changing the physical way we farm and produce our crops,” says Bate. “At the farm level, most producers are still walking out in the field, looking at their crops or livestock and doing the same thing they have always done, perhaps backed by a bit more knowledge and data, but there has been no fundamental shift in changed farming practices.
“But now I think we are on the edge of something big; a real leap forward. And it will be robotics that will be the game changer; farm robots like ours that will suck up all the Big
Data being generated and actually turn it into something useful, flipping our traditional ways of industrialised farming on their head.”
Since Andrew and Jocie Bate first dreamt eight years ago of building little robots to change the shape of agriculture – think “swarms” of small unmanned robots toiling in paddocks with a light footprint throughout the day and night without a break instead of heavy and expensive tractors requiring drivers, fuel, capital and causing soil damage – the world of agricultural technology globally has changed dramatically.
Investment globally in upstream “agtech” as it is known in Australia, has exploded into an industry attracting $7.6 billion of new investment and capital a year, growing at more than 25 per cent a year. In 2013, the sector – which investment research company AgFunder divides into categories such as innovative food, ag biotechnology, sensors and the internet of things, and farm robotics – was worth just $1.6 billion.
Overall, agtech accounted for 39 per cent of all capital flowing into the broader $20 billion global agrifood technology marketplace last year, which included “downstream”: online grocers, food delivery services, restaurants and retail.
Some of the investment deals have been huge. Early plant-based “meat” company Beyond Meats raised $300 million in one deal, before launching on the US Stock Exchange with a value that soared within days to more than $US9 billion.
John Harvey, managing director of national rural R&D corporation AgriFutures, says while Australia has been something of a slow starter in developing, selling and adopting agrifood-technology, a spurt of real growth is now occurring.
Harvey estimates that in 2017 there was less than $30 million of capital flowing annually into new agtech ventures and technology. Last year it exceeded $90 million.
Whereas in the past there was a focus on hi-tech gadgets and widgets – robots, drones, moisture sensors and tractors that could steer themselves – now the field has expanded to include virtual e-fencing, biogenetics, innovative food, soil carbon initiatives, gut microflora adjustments, alternate systems of farming, mobile phone-like livestock ear tags, the internet of Things and supply-chain provenance and biosecurity data sharing and transfer.
“It is an exciting time because so many new technologies are being developed to meet the challenges we’ll face in the future, not just on the farm but along the entire food supply chain,” says Harvey.
“What we are finding is that these Australian inventions and start-ups are innovative, not confined to geographical boundaries or regions, or even just to agriculture; this is a global market now and a lot of these technologies are highly scale-able and transferable to other industries, which makes them highly attractive to investment.”
Some of the recent local capital raisings by agtech start-ups have certainly been impressive.
In April, South Australian-based Myriota, a company that links data flow from the internet of Things back to users via nanosatellites, raised an impressive $28 million.
Flourosat, a highly automated software and analytics company targeted at orchardists raised a further $5 million, while virtual fencing company Agersens, with its solar-powered neck bands for cattle linked to imaginary “fence” lines drawn on a computerised farm map, has been partly bought by traditional fencing giant Gallagher.
Successful but little-known information management and cloud collaboration software developer targeting agronomists and farmers, West Australian-based AgWorld, has raised more than $15 million from investors including Syngenta.
In August major investors, including mining and beef entrepreneur Andrew Forrest, Woolworths and GrainCorp, poured more than $13 million into new business Future Feed, to help commercialise the CSIRO discovery that red asparagopsis seaweed fed as an additive to cattle can reduce damaging methane emissions that contribute to global warming and climate change by 80 per cent.
And leading horticultural irrigation sensing and microclimate predictive business, The Yield, recently sold a major shareholding stake worth $11 million to fund its expansion into America, with the bulk coming from new investor Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley, along with existing investor and its sensor manufacturer Bosch.
Far North Queensland sugar cane grower Steven Calcagno, has experienced first-hand just how rapidly new ag technology can change the way he manages his family sugar cane farm at Babinda.
With cane growers along Queensland’s coast under pressure to reduce the amount of fertiliser run-off flowing into creeks and rivers and harming coral health on the neighbouring Great Barrier Reef, Calcagno and 100 other local farmers have recently taken part in a pilot partnership project also involving CSIRO scientists and water quality specialists from James Cook University.
Water quality sensors were installed on Calcagno’s farm to record levels of fertiliser nitrates in the waterway during cane-growing season and after heavy rain.
The information was immediately relayed back to Calcagno and other growers by data telemetry and a special CSIRO app on their mobile phones, enabling the growers to immediately see what levels of nitrates were running off their farms into waterways, to consider ways to reduce the concentrations and adapt their management practices.
“You can’t control what you can’t measure, and you can’t expect farmers to change their practices and behaviour unless they trust the data, are fully informed and involved, and understand what the issues are and their impact on the reef,” says Sheriden Morris, chair of one of the project’s funder, the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre.
Steven Calcagno agrees. He is now excited about the future when before he was pessimistic about government regulations and restrictions being placed on cane growers; a consequence of a new belief based on the reliable water quality sensor data he is now receiving that farmers can be part of the solution to helping the Great Barrier Reef and its precious corals survive.
“By working together and having immediate water quality and nitrate run-off data through the year we can rely on and trust thanks to the sensors and our phone app, we can now look at solutions – already some growers are adjusting the timing and amount of their urea applications to avoid coinciding with the first rains of the wet season, or delaying putting on fertilisers if rain is forecast; others are experimenting with lower rates later in the year, or delaying putting on fertilisers if heavy rain is forecast.”
Major corporate cropping company Viridis Ag, a subsidiary of Macquarie Bank’s huge $3 billion Australian agricultural division, is committed to using the latest technology to “do more with less” on its 90,000 hectares of cropping country spread across 11 properties.
Viridis Ag chief executive Sean O’Reilly, watching the late October harvest begin on the company’s new 3000-hectare cropping farm Oodnadatta in northern NSW, says the agtech advancements in the past five years have been rapid and far-reaching.
From measuring soil carbon content on all Viridis Ag farms to looking at ways to apply data farming systems, machine learning and artificial intelligence that enable agriculture to use less energy, chemicals, fertilisers and a lower carbon footprint, O’Reilly says every facet of smart technology is being investigated.
Already during the year, three SwarmFarm robots have trawled through Viridis Ag crops to kill weeds with highly targeted micro-volume rates of herbicide, saving on fuel, chemical use and labour. Other experiments are investigating if future robots could target weeds with fatal microwave blasts or even remove them mechanically.
At Oodnadatta young workers Misty Acton, Matilda Paesler and Harrison Cobbin sit in massive automated headers harvesting the thick barley crop, without the need to steer, adjust header speed, threshing rates or fuel use, as grain yield, size, moisture and quality data is all automatically fed into the intelligent machine.
“I’m not a crazy snake oil guy but with all the agtech developments we are seeing, the way we farm is totally changing,” says O’Reilly.
“I’m looking to embed technology, data and artificial intelligence in every facet of our operations so we can consider more variables, be more predictive and reduce our risk – not just from a yield and profit perspective but our risk to the environment and our carbon footprint.”
“Another positive to all the technology that has arrived in the last 3-5 years is that we are really seeing a definite change in the number of younger people coming back to agriculture because they are excited about the technology; they like the opportunity to apply this sort of digital thinking to farming.”
But the agtech revolution is not just confined to the big corporate farmers. In western Victoria, sheep and wool grower Luke Balkin says the Farmbot remote monitoring device has saved him at least a morning-a-week’s work, now he no longer has to manually inspect the four main dams and water tanks on the several properties he owns and leases around Glenthompson.
Since installing Farmbot units on each tank and synchronising the real-time water analytics dashboard to reach his mobile phone and computers, Balkin says he has become ‘addicted’ to the analysis of his water levels and pump activity and the business decisions he can make as a result.
He has no doubts the $1200 cost of each unit and the attached software is already paying off. “It’s taken the worry out of water; the water levels checks and graphs that are accessible 24/7 to me sitting at the kitchen table tell me just about everything I need to know about where my water is, how much I have, and how quickly it is moving through to the animals,” says Balkin. “We expect that we are saving in the ballpark of $10,000 a year just in labour that can be redeployed into other activities across our farms.”
Near Pyramid Hill, sheep and wheat grower Adam Twigg has been taking part in a trial to see if drones can be a useful tool to fly over his lambing ewes to check for any birth problems, without the disturbance that goes with driving a ute around the flock. (He’s not yet convinced.)
But on sea-based fish farms in Tasmania and pearl farms in the Kimberley, drones are successfully being used to check for algal outbreaks and fish-pen damage, while they have also proved invaluable in assessing crop damage after hailstorms for the insurance industry.
North of Narrabri, NSW, B&W Rural agronomist Brad Donald is visiting the cropping property Boolcarrol, being run by young farmer Alex Harris since he returned home after working in city market trading.
Donald and Harris pour over their iPads while standing in a vast wheat paddock, using the latest Satamap information – based on recent satellite spatial images and biomass analytics of the crop taken every few days – to determine the driest part of the paddocks, where to start harvesting first, and what yields are likely.
Brad Donald then launches his small drone above the grain storage bunker at Boolcarrol, using its laser imagery and data conversion capability to measure the dimensions and capacity of the empty bunker, in order to keep track of grain storage volumes during the coming harvest.
B&W Rural chief executive Peter Birch, who employs 13 agronomists to work with local grain and cotton growers, says while many farmers are excited about the new technologies, there is also a lot of confusion about how to align the different tools, gadgets, machinery and software to make them talk to each other. “Growers have all this information and technology coming at them – precision farming, AI, variable rate mapping, satellites and drones – but many are finding it really hard to pick a clear line through it all to see how it is really useful and cost-effective for them,” says Birch.
“But the whole cotton industry up here is using moisture sensors and software analytic programs that give you an irrigation water usage curve and tell you when to irrigate and how much, and predict when you need to irrigate again.
“Combine that with weather stations, more accurate forecasting and satellite imagery and you end up with very powerful information all pooled together, and that results in real (irrigation) water savings for growers, much better water management, and more bales per megalitre at the end of the day.”
Birch says, apart from water and cotton, it is also still difficult to get some farmers to appreciate the value of what the technology and data is providing and telling them.
“Farmers will buy a $600,000 header and not blink an eyelid, but if you talk about software and technology (subscriptions), that might cost them $3 a hectare a year, they um and ahh and ask if it is of real value; but the switched-on growers have no problem seeing the monetary value, that all this amazing information coming to them from their paddocks is providing better and more timely decision making.”
Andrew Coppin, president of the fledgling Australian Agritech Association and founder of Farmbot water monitoring systems, is equally as excited and frustrated as Birch.
He sees “awesome” inventions and developments in agtech happening across Australia – and some stars taking to the world stage such as The Yield – and a boom in uptake by local farmers on the horizon.
“But worldwide, while Australia is regarded as a gold medal winner in agriculture, food and farming globally, we don’t even seem to have a ticket to be in the race when it comes to agritech,” despairs Coppin.
“Israel, New Zealand and the UK are the global leaders – investors are literally flying over the top of Australia without landing to see what NZ is doing – yet many of our technologies could be world-beaters; we need a vision, a strategy and a plan to help the agritech sector grow and prosper and become a major export industry in its own right.”
Ros Harvey, founder and managing director of world-leading The Yield sensoring company, says the key to agtech success lies in helping a farmer solve their problems, rather than offering up a fixed package of technology and telling the grower it will be really useful.
This approach helped The Yield refine its original broad offerings of internet of Things sensors with a centralised, cloud-based analysis system to a wide range of rural industries, to instead specialise on high-value, irrigated horticultural crops such as wine grapes, berries and nuts, many in enclosed glasshouse or with their own covered microclimates.
Harvey says she has also learned to “only walk” with large corporations, especially now The Yield holds the global patent rights to “predicting weather” in enclosed microclimates such as greenhouse tunnels. “Large companies know technology is their future and can make them money; unsurprisingly their investors are demanding it,” says Harvey.
“Our field is analytics, artificial intelligence and crop insights of which data is the fuel; the corporates often have these data sets collected but don’t know how to put it to work; we offer them immediate savings, reduced costs and risk, and the value proposition is so high for them in these intensive, irrigated horticultural crops.”
Harvey is equally confident other Australian agtech companies can follow in The Yield’s successful footsteps, raise significant capital from overseas investors and expand into global markets. Being remote from markets is no hurdle when it comes to technology.
“There’s no better place for agtech innovation than the diverse microclimates of Australia. With one of the most challenging agricultural industries in the world, growers must innovate to remain competitive, and embrace technology to help drive sustainability, increase traceability and productivity, and consumer confidence in the way our food is produced.”
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