 My name's Tiffany Bennett. I'm a livestock consultant with Pural Solutions SA at the extension arm for PERSA. We're here today at the Struan Research Farm with John Cooper, the farm manager at Struan Farm here, and Michael Wilkes from Thomas Elder Consulting. We'll be looking at remote way options for cattle and looking at the Optiway system and the opportunities and benefits that that provides. Elders and the Thomas Elder Institute have partnered with PERSA to undertake a strategic partnership to turn the Struan and Kibibolite research farms into best practice demonstration farms. And a big part of that is the strategic use of AgTech to improve the productivity and efficiency of our farming businesses. Part of that is technology such as this, which is the Optiway remote cattle weighing system, which enables us to weigh cattle in the paddock real time without having to yard them and dramatically reducing our labour component. Yes, so we had the Optiway delivered here in late January, so we've had it for four months now. As you can see it being well used, it's rubbed and full of mud. We've used it firstly to monitor our heifer live weights, looking to get our heifers up to a mating weight in June and also for our steer weights going into our cell grazing program. We'd like to keep our steers going forward at this time of the year before we get into winter. So it's been a very effective tool in both those things. It's a really good way daily to just get a percentage of the mob coming over the machine and you can just look each day or each week and say, yes, my feeding program is working, they're gaining weight or no, it's not working, they're losing weight, whatever you want to do. But it's just a really good way of monitoring the performance of your cattle. It's like any other weighing system, it doesn't take very long to get a weight. You'll see that the cattle, they do spend their time in there licking the molasses. So that's not an issue, but it does weigh them quite quickly. We finish a lot of freezing bulls into the export market. The first job we had with the OptiWay was in our cell grazing systems monitoring the weight of our bulls looking to see which mobs were getting up to soil weight and tracking that. So it did a good job of that and as you can see, bulls are always pretty rough on equipment and the OptiWay stood up to that really well. So there's multiple ways that we can weigh livestock remotely in the paddock. Typically that's been a walkover weighing system where animals walk over a full load platform and their entire weight is measured, typically as they move to a water source. Those systems work well but do require more infrastructure in terms of fencing. OptiWay here measures the front feed for the animal and then based on the weight of that and the class and age of the animal, the algorithms are then used to predict the whole live weight of the animal and we're getting very good correlations between the OptiWay weight and actual live weights measured in the yards. The main benefit of remote weighing livestock is A, labour saving, in that you're not yarding animals frequently, keeping them off feed, putting them through stressful handling procedures. The other thing is to be able to actually monitor their performance real time and make sure A that they're tracking to their weight going goals and that your feeding regimes are appropriate and B also monitoring their trajectory to a market endpoint particularly for animals destined for a slaughter endpoint. We can make sure that they're tracking right performing how we like and if they're not we can make a management intervention to ensure that they're going to pick up their performance. As you can see it's fairly easy to move, it's very lightweight, portable, towable, even a quad bike can tow it around and basically how it works when it's out in the paddock here is we have a weigh scale underneath with load bars, a small trough inside which we place an attractant typically a mineral lick or salt or molasses, an EID panel reader that reads the animal's ear tag that then feeds into a scale head behind the panel, basically the beast walks on, puts its front feed on the scale, licks at the attractant, the tag is red, the weight of the animal, the front half of the animal is taken and collects the data, sends it wirelessly through 4G signal through to a server where the data is collated and then available for the producer through an interface online where they can see cattle weights and monitor the performance of their herd. So here we have the online interface, the data from the Optiway unit feeds back to here's one of the displays that we can look at, the average weight by day whereby the blue bars are the number of animals that have visited the Optiway on any given day and the green line is our average weight for those animals that have visited the machine. So what we're looking at is what data I receive from the Optiway cattle weighing machine down in the paddock. So as you'll see every morning I get a summary sent to my office computer which shows us the number of animals that have been in the machine, the number of records recorded, the average weight and the weight range of those animals recorded that day. This is the email message I receive every morning, if you're an early riser it comes in at about one o'clock in the morning but it just gives you a summary of what's happened the previous day. So you can see yesterday being the 19th, we're in the Angus Steer mob, seven animals had been in the Optiway crate that day and we've got 22 records from those seven animals. As a percentage of the mob is only 6%, their average weight 402, weight range 353 to 464. So a very thumbnail sketch, at least you know the machine is working what's happening and then you can go through and look at some of the summaries it produces for you. This particular one lists the animal identification down the left-hand side and by each week the average weight of that animal so you can follow through, this was a particularly good animal that's been in there every week and you can follow through and just see what is its live weight doing, is it holding, is it gaining or is it losing. So as a percentage of the mob you can then tailor things such as I had mentioned before, heifer mating weights, are we on track to get the heifers to a mating weight on the 1st of June and this sort of data gives you really good heads up on what's happening out in the paddock. You can of course download that into an Excel spreadsheet for your data recording if you want to keep it that way. I always just leave it in this Optiway format. I find that's fine for me and is readily available. As I said we've had it since January. All the records are easily stored and brought up in this particular fashion but you can download it and then play with it as you would like. So one of the main applications of this is to be able to have a snapshot of your herd weight and their growth rate performance over time without having to yard them. Basically 20 to 30% snapshot I guess of weights of the animals will enable you to see how the herd is tracking overall. Yeah with the Optiway there's no calibration or anything you need to do. It's got a full electronic set of weight cells on there ready to go so there's no issues about having to calibrate your scales. That's preset and has been right on. We've compared the weights we're getting on the Optiway with weighing the actual cattle in the yards itself and there's no issue there, very close. The Optiway is a standalone unit. It doesn't need anything else, it's completely self-contained. Powered by this solar panel and you've got a long life battery stored down the bottom here out of the way and protected in a box from the animals. So the only consideration you have to have is to have the solar panel facing north just to maximise its output. We've used the Optiway in our farm enterprises here at Struan so we haven't had to worry too much about the biosecurity from mob to mob but as you can see it's a waterproof machine, very easy to wash down and hose off with disinfectant if you're going between farms or you have a biosecurity issue you want to address. So the Optiway is about $15,000 to buy so it's a reasonable investment to come on farm with. One of the things we are keen is to just do an evaluation of are we getting value for money with it. So over the next couple of months we'll be able to do a cost benefit to our operation about has that expense been worth it and as it's going on at the moment I'm finding it a very useful tool. So depending on how many cattle you've got and what sort of inputs you're putting into your herd you'll be able to do that cost benefit and we'll be able to provide our figures as well to help you make those decisions. As part of the best practice demonstration farm that Elders and Purser have gone into partnership on here at Struan we'll be implementing a range of ag tech and management practices around the farm and the performance of those and the effect that they have on the farm business will be benchmarked and a cost benefit will be determined for them and we'll be able to demonstrate that to producers within the region and throughout the country. What the benefits of using innovation and technology in livestock production system is how it can improve the profitability of their businesses and make life easier and that's a really key focus of the best practice demonstration farm. As you can see there are plenty of opportunities that the Optiway will provide beef producers to help remotely manage their cattle beller. Thank you to Michael Wilkes and John Cooper for providing the information today.