 So, reili, this session is just to, I guess, move on with some of the discussion we started in the field and this morning. Really like to explore, you know, what are some of the barriers to growers taking up agtech, and so I'd probably like to throw that question to each of you, potentially starting with Chris. Yeah, just in your experience, Chris, what are some of the barriers that you've found to growers taking up agtech? I know it's a very broad question, but let's just kick it off there. Well, I suppose one thing I'd start off with is, when we say barriers to agtech, I don't want to be too semantic, but what is agtech? I actually think there's a lot of growers, and I'm probably being more specific to small, medium-sized enterprises. They're actually using a lot of agtech already. It's just to how we perceive it. I look around this room and a lot of people are already using agtech. Researchers, developers, obviously agtech companies, you know, a handful of small growers here. I think a lot of it has to be driven by curiosity, but also a need that's been talked about. But to be more specific, I guess, that's that question in terms of barriers to adoption. I think perceived cost is absolutely one of them. The other is, I guess that, as I think Robin mentioned, there's this plethora of, I guess, discussion and technologies out there, and it looks quite mind-boggling at the moment, and I think you all know that. And I think as providers you need to try and, I guess, think more carefully about the benefits. This is probably my piece of advice. Good old Steve Jobs. We hear a lot about the features. We don't always hear about the benefits, but also trying to join the dots and show that benefit to that individual enterprise. We can talk about, you know, it saves money, you can go on holidays. I certainly don't always see that, and I think sometimes we're seeing a promise being sold, not a benefit specific to that enterprise backed up with case studies and to be sort of showing it in real terms, if that makes any sense. So there are, I guess, many barriers, but I think the other one is patience. We all need to be patient. This is not going to happen in five years. There's a big, big frenzy, I think, in the last five to ten years. That's often what happens when new things come in. It'll take time. It'll be a progressive thing. I'm going to go to a very simple one. It's fear of overwhelming of how much to do as a grower. Just take on one. Just take on what you can do. The industry's got too much going on for me anyway, and just narrow it down to one. That's all I've really got. I think we've been doing agtech for many, many years. I sort of look at the research station here, and it started in 1937, and it started off in the horse and cart days, and you know, you sort of look where we are today. And over all those years, there's been agtech happening through all the different generations. We just have to look at, I guess, manual pruning. We started off with hand snips, sores. We've gone to air snips, and now we've gone to electric snips, and now we're going to snips where we don't even have to carry a battery. It's got its battery all in build, and this is all agtech moving forward. And so what we've got today in agtech, ten years down the track, it may be old-fashioned again, and there may be new agtech coming along all the time. So I guess, you know, like myself, I've been in this great industry now for 40-odd years, and what I've seen develop from, you know, the early days of irrigation when we're flood irrigating, using soca hoses, and just irrigating everything and using salt-y ball water. We've gone away from that now, and we've got latest technology with drip irrigation and the billwater scheme, and also soil moisture probes, and there's just so much new things coming along all the time. So I think, yeah, we've just got to keep moving forward in all the latest gadgets and gizmos that come out all the time and help us along our way. But at the end of the day, I think we've all still grown pretty good grapes in the bracer and making some damn good wines, actually. So it's great to see. Good. Thanks, guys. Any questions now from the audience? Hi. Yeah, Joe here from Onside. I have a question in regard to great growers that are being stakeholders in AgTech, obviously. What's your perception of how they like to take on-board information about AgTech? So if we go back 20 years ago, it was probably the case of if you didn't go to a field day, you didn't get to see the new stuff. Nowadays, we're all quite busy, and I'm wondering what your take is on how potential customers to AgTech would like to get that information? I guess you always get some growers who are always very forward-thinking growers, and soon as something new comes on the scene, they jump on it straight away. Then you'll get others who are more reserved, and they'll sort of sit back and wait to see how it will develop. And quite often, eventually, even the reserve growers will jump on stream, be on the track. But yeah, there's always a few out there that soon as something new comes along, let's do it. Let's go for it. You've got to see value for it of where it's going to go. There's some technology that you may get a dollar value out this year. We've put mox orders on our harvesters. It's worked really well. The wiring's been fantastic comments for it. We jumped on board that technology, but are we going to get paid more money? Don't know, but we'd like to think we're in front of the pack for doing that. But no, benefit. So probably sound a bit corny. I do not call it egg tech. I think you probably don't want to mean by that, but if someone rocks up, I've got the latest technology. There'll be people out there who... There'll be the late majority that made me the laggards. So there's an incredibly diverse audience, and we know agricultural, broadly speaking, it's pretty conservative, risk averse, cautious. So there is no one so it fits all. I think you probably know the answer to it, to your question, certainly demonstrating real value. The thing is James's point. And making sure people appreciate that it's not going to be intimidating. I've seen people being intimidated by some new technologies. They don't trust their own capability sometimes, and you really need to walk them through it. And I guess make people realise you don't have to have a PhD. You don't have to... What's the weird span hours out of it? And that's probably the other thing, occasion. So hang on, that looks awesome, and I understand all the things it could do. I don't want to sit in the office for three hours every morning trying to make sense of it before I go out in the field. So it's got to be quick. And one of the best bits of agtech is these things. So not everything has to be on that platform, but Jesus, I can tell you, it's used massively now. We're full-time mobile network shut down. We'd be in big trouble. Just keep it simple. Just keep the language down for people. Like out there today, you hear these acronyms coming through. That's fantastic for people in this room, but that person that's not here, they just want to hear the basics. They just want to understand what you're talking about in one step at a time. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I heard a lot of technical talk out there today. Didn't hear as many benefits. And it's the benefits that the growers want to hear about, not the actual technology and how it works. Always. That's something I would say. Yeah, we want to be able to just see it on the screen and then be able to read it in layman's terms and use that information to help us in our everyday decisions as vineyard managers, actually. And yeah, so it just needs to be plain, simple and easy to understand. And I think the term AI is misused a lot, as I think you tech people no better than me. We don't get in the semantics of machine learning and AI, but I think sometimes too that just kind of straight away feels very theoretical. So look, I'll give you a quick example at the risk of upsetting someone, but if someone comes along and says, I can use satellite imagery to tell you the pH of your grape crop today, you'll have a lot of trouble selling that to a winemaker. They will not trust it. It's as simple as that. But it's an adjunct to what we normally do, absolutely. So the idea occasionally if someone says, well, we can do this and you'll never have to go and do that job, don't bet on it. Ground truth thing is the other thing I see a real lack of. So probably comments, more questions, but be interested to know what your reaction is. I've heard a lot of discussion today about cost. And as somebody said before, almost no discussion at all about benefit. And the fact of the matter is that the capital cycle of an average vineyard is 30 years. And in the Barossa, as everybody would know, particularly if you've been to Turkey flat or Langmal, it might be over 100 years. So there's a strong incentive for people to sort of reconsider the consideration of cost and think about the value. Because if, for instance, you want to use a piece of agtech for improving your yield estimation and you currently estimate your yield with lets for the sake of argument, say an error of 10% or 15%, if by spending some money on a system that allows you to do that with an error of about 3%, and also you don't any longer have to use your own labour or the labour of your staff to do that, then maybe the benefit significantly outweighs the cost. But until people start thinking about the value of the information that they get from agtech, we're not going to change the way people think about that. The other thing that occurs to me, and by the way, I've been working in agtech for over 20 years admittedly from a research perspective, but everybody talks about associated with the cost, the annual subscription, which is pretty much confined to a cost associated with data curation. It goes up to the cloud. There's a real advantage in that because it's backed up, but all of these various proprietary systems have data subscriptions that result in the data residing somewhere where, as we've heard, the grower nonetheless owns it and can withdraw it, but nonetheless it's somewhere else. But I'd suggest that growers don't actually want lots of discrete systems. They want a system for managing their data, and that system needs to be able to handle both the sort of point data that comes out of a moisture probe but also map data that might be generated, for example, from remotely sensed imagery, yield mapping if anybody ever picks that up again, or a whole range of other spatial type applications. And I don't see this changing much whilst the agtech companies insist on their own proprietary systems, so I'd be encouraging growers and their advisers, like the guys sitting up at the front, to be demanding a bit of a change there. It's all very well for one company to say that its API can be read into Swan Systems or whoever else's system it might happen to be, but that still involves the use of a proprietary system and somebody mentioned Hans Loder earlier on who's building his own system. Very few people are going to want to do that, but we need to have much greater portability of data, and I don't think that will happen until the market demands it. So I'd encourage people who are interested in this stuff to start getting a bit noisier and possibly angrier in demanding the sort of technology that actually serves their needs. I know Oli Majit has a group together to look at that collaboration of data, Rob. So if anyone does want to get involved in that, I've got Oli's details, you can join that group. I'm pleased to start anyway. There's another question over the back here. Yeah, hello there. Like Rob, who I thoroughly respect, I've been working in Agtech for 20-odd years also, but on the commercial side as a supplier, but I understand Rob's question, but there is an aspect that data storage needs to generally be in the cloud for it to be available on your phone like the presenters up here said they want it available in their hand if it's stored on their own computer. It's just like me trying to sign in to look at my video of my dog last night while I was out at dinner and the Wi-Fi has fallen off the bench and now I can't access the data because it's stored, you know, I'm using it from my own source. So I think it's... these cloud services are the... there is a reason that all the companies are going that way. It's cheap bang for buck for the benefits of being stored in the cloud. And the same is on web services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, they're all there for a reason. I had a question for Robin. Just in your presentation, you said if growers want to come and have a look around the Agtech here another day and obviously Rodgers is quite familiar with it now, but who gives them that tour and how does that all work? So it depends on obviously for here we do have Dominic, so Dominic goes between here and Lockston. So he can actually facilitate that for you. So yeah, if there's anything you want to come out and you want to see the dashboards, you want to use the mobi, shears yourself or anything like that, we can facilitate that. So it's just really a call or an email set up at the time, which is convenient for both. Yeah, we're fairly flexible. Great, thank you. Just a comment. We're involved in yourself with the Agtech people. We're involved with Airborne Logic with Andy and as part of the development, they ask, ask what we want rather than the supplier saying this is what we're giving you. So I fully support people and the coming four of asking both suppliers what you want to know rather than the other way around. And Andy just as a plug does a fantastic job in asking those questions of us. So I'm fully support, question them and question them and question them. Thank you Andy again. One of the things that I think about Agtech is you've got this precision, Agtech. I know growers with you to per redevelopment, there's a huge overwhelm in terms of where do I start and I think that's a big role that Agtech plays is to help you decide where to start. If you start in the wrong block you could be wasting your time, wasting your money or maybe you should have pulled it out instead of reworking it. So from my point of view, does anyone else have a comment on that from the panel? I mean we've tried to tackle this issue of Utipa reworking with some of our tools that we've provided growers because we realise it's an issue, this overwhelm issue and I think data can help you with that. Have you seen any examples of that you guys? Yeah, I probably can't quite one specific right now but I think there are scenarios per sheet to James's point about development. There's got to be a lot of collaboration which there is, whether it be from people, like managers, consultants, growers on the ground, researchers. It's a journey together. That sounds all a bit warm and fuzzy I know but sometimes I've got to, I guess, sometimes it's needed to get the data and I think we've got to get the data and sometimes we may not know what to do with it and I'm not talking about a small grower scenario if I can use that term but at a development level sometimes we've just got to get the data and then later on we'll find what we can do with it and that's quite often I think the benefits are probably things we haven't even thought of yet and I've had discussions with Andy likewise with some of the work we're doing in the vine improvement propagation sector about virus detection. We're not really sure how it's all going to go but we've just got to get on with it and I think to your question Rob, sort of, sometimes that process is really powerful to understand the benefit cost ratios. We've just got to take it for spin and I think the other thing I know I'll quote Andy here, a great little analogy is sometimes the things that might be a one-solve there might be almost like a forensic scenario finding a problem fix it and a subscription is not suitable to that. It could be just a one-off job and subscriptions are fine for other things dynamic things and again, I'll keep telling one of your analogies about the different technologies we don't all need a Ferrari to take the kids to school kids will love it but it's a bit unnecessary sometimes the girl holding you so to speak will do the job so it's got to be fit for purpose and that I think is critical piece of where that benefit cost comes in. James, any comment? I don't know what to really add to that one. I guess as a manager you should have a pretty good feel on your own property and when you're living in there every day you see what needs to be done and doesn't need to be done and I guess you could use a block like Cabernet and if it's getting an older block and do you look at reworking it or do you look at grubbing it and I think you have to take into account how many vines are in there and do have die back and things like that and I don't know my past experience on most reworking older blocks unless it's really high end fruit you're better off to grub and replant it sorry and then you've got a nice new vineyard again for the next umpteen years so I don't know if that sort of helps answer that question but you also need to know where your property is at for us when I started where I am right now two years ago irrigation system was in need of repair we've repaired a portion of it that's going better now we're slowly going to move on to automate the system so it's about grabbing the tools that you need when you need them don't step too far in front because suddenly you've got all this information and it's great information but you can't actually put onto your property yet because your property hasn't got to that space yet so you need to be slowly stepping that property forward before you can use that information so again my continual point is one step at a time and use what's relevant for your property don't jump in because irrigation system could not have handled what we've talked about today until we fix that so one step at a time this might be going back to something we talked about earlier but um a question to the panel in terms of what you would say to the ag tech suppliers is you know there's a lot of talk in the agricultural scene in terms of even if a grower can see a change in an improvement or more profitability they still might not take up that change do you think there's a need for the ag tech companies to understand behavioural of psychology at all in terms of helping growers with that change because it's very easy to talk about technical things it would help if you talked about the benefits more but is there something in that behavioural change psychology that you need in your team to be able to get people to transfer to this technology it's a very tricky question but it's a phenomenon I think like any growth they go and invest $5,000, $10,000 they want to see some sort of improvement with also the end sale of their product as well so but it's also working closely with your wine company here you're selling your grapes with and if your GLO comes out and thinks jeez the system you're using here you've got fantastic results your grapes are going to go up to an extra grade you'll get extra money for this fruit and then that leads on to just doing more and better improvements in your vineyard all the time I guess it doesn't matter what you invest in and get those rewards back and if that's going to happen it should flow fairly easy for the egg tech guys to get out there and sell to the growers I don't know what the answer is to that actually I think it's make it personal and actually be a site visit and actually see you not get the phone call from Sydney representing the international whose sitting in Spain and actually talk the language with the grower comments Chris at all well it's interesting I think in agriculture has very community based so I guess sometimes I think it's a case of trying to encourage people to work with their neighbour but there's certainly opportunities I think where there might be efficiencies possible where a group of people in a given area get together and I think as we all know in our sector it is very much over the fence kind of things but I think I guess what I'm trying to say is take that in the next step what if those people that are over the fence and they get along and they share a lot of knowledge what if they can go well let's together have a go at something and sort of learn together and I think that just helps bring a bit more confidence into that, into those participants in that little group and to elaborate on something that was brought up earlier this is not a specific example but the to that that Rob you asked about the weather station network there is certainly going to be a level of caution about sharing information some are very free to share some are but we also need to be careful with that scenario, to be honest I think with the work I do with Nick in BGW in Brussels Australia we probably would hesitate about soil moisture because it's not going to be applicable and we wouldn't want people to use it or that sensor down at Fred's place saying this I should do this I think we have to be obviously encouraging people to tailor that the regionals where the network gets used in various levels some people are just curious other people probably would use that data if it's nearby for their spray diaries so they straight away go oh that's cool that's quite handy for me so yeah I think let's leverage that community and collective kind of mindset instead of leaving people on their own sometimes yeah so just to reiterate we have collaborated with the vineyard owners who have had an ex te war project weather station on their properties what's the website to get into that and have a look at those weather stations Chris greenbrain.org yeah it's on my phone I think it's greenbrain.org just google actually I think you might even be able to google MIA Barossa MIA Barossa but for those of you in the Barossa just contact Nicky it's pretty easy to find and there's 17 stations there from all different sites that you can look at and I guess the video watch bullet and I provide I do that Clare Valley in Barossa I use that a lot as well and also I would just say we'd hope to troll the Athena plant stress sensory tool on one of our demo vineyards this coming growing season so just keep an ear out on the Barossa Australian newsletter for when we're having demonstration days it's a good way to look over the vineyard fence at what other growers are doing or what we're helping growers trial on their vineyards and then you don't have to try it yourself you can actually see how it's going somewhere else to take that leap so please look out for those grower days where we have a grower field day come along and ask, obviously recommend there's a lot of people not here today I can't see that many growers in the shed today so please pass that on I just wanted to say Nicky, thank you very very much for being our MC today very very very grateful for doing that to our presenters as well so thank you very much for taking part in the panel but thank you very much all for coming