 Well it's my great pleasure to be the emcee for this afternoon and during the next hour we're going to explore two sessions the first is going to be in a way what are the messages that came from the sessions today you will have not had a chance to visit all of those sessions so we give you an overview of that and from that come what are the key findings that are coming out from that and that's going to be very helpful in informing the strategy development we wish to present to the minister in the next six months or so through the AgTech advisory group. So to kick off let me introduce our first panel members to explore the opportunities and barriers to adoption of AgTech into production in particularly in South Australia but not exclusively. First can I welcome Dr. Andy Lowe. Andy is I'm going to give you a very brief introduction because you've probably heard all these before anyways through the sessions. Andy is the inaugural director of Agri Food and Wine at the University of Adelaide and he was formerly the science director of the Fight Food Waste Cooperative Research Centre. Please join us up here Andy. And we thank him for being the chair and facilitator of the farm management stream today. And our second panel member is Ollie Majer. Ollie brings a digital and IT background which he has now successfully applied to the Ag sector through his family vineyard. First to address his own issues in Ag production and effective land management but now offers demonstration facilities on that farm as well. He also runs the Adelaide AgTech meetups which is a member and is a member of the Agri Futures Ignite panel. Welcome to us Ollie. And Ollie was the chair and facilitator of today's remote sensing stream. And Tom Rainer is our third panel member. Tom is currently the vice president of sales as well as a number of other functions at the satellite communications company Myriota which has significant applications in the AgTech sector as well as a very strong involvement with the whole space sector and our new SpaceSat CRC. Tom has previously worked with elders and also is a fifth generation farmer of a Wheaton Marina sheep farm in the mid north. And we thank Tom for chairing today's internet of things device stream. Now finally I would like to introduce another member who was not a chairing one of the sessions but has a lot to offer to us and that's Emma Leonard. She's the editor of Precision Ag News and owner of Agri No. Emma is a Nuffield farming scholar and Churchill Fellow and she's currently undertaking a PhD on the topic very close to our hearts overcoming the barriers to adoption of digital agriculture. So Emma will have a lot to offer. Welcome everyone. Okay so I'm now going to move from here and start the panel session. Thank you and I'd like to start by asking each of the three panel members what the key themes were that came out of their sessions today because I'm sure there's going to be a lot of overlap but probably some individual ones. Andy we'll start at the end. Yeah thanks very much. So I was chair of the farm management system so we had six presentations over the course of the day. So Ag World looking at collaborative farm management field in managing on farm data. AgriWeb livestock management data management tie up end-to-end data in farming. Peter P Agri which is really around financial and farm management and then swan systems irrigation and nutrient management. So across those six presentations we had a diversity of issues and it was really a software solution that was being provided to allow key data that's derived either from input from the farmers or from employees around the farm or from data systems that are collecting the data into a decision making framework. So I mean one of the key messages for me Liana was that AgriTech is already here within systems. Farmers are actively adopting a lot of these software systems and a lot of these software systems have been running for 10 years and have been iteratively updating given input from the farmers. There's a lot of complexity to farm management systems and hence why we see quite a number of different solutions that are out there within the marketplace at the moment and each of those different solutions are targeting in on a particular sector. So we saw solutions that were specifically designed for the livestock sector the cropping sector the horticultural sector or more around financial or irrigation based systems. A lot of the issues really all production systems really emphasize the importance of getting farmer input or producer input for the design and we actually saw quite a few testimonials in the presentations from farmers or producers that were saying how good some of that interaction had been. It's clear that a lot of these systems need good support and software and the design of those and with the support and training also comes an opportunity for those that are developing the systems and the software to engage with farmers and producers and update those systems. So it's definitely a positive and also something that was emphasized I think in all six presentations. The I think return on investment was also a critical issue if you're not going to present a system that's going to save farmers money you're not going to get buying to that system and it's also really important to be able to articulate clearly what the what the benefit is and most of the presentation that we saw had a dollar saving per hectare or per product so that was really clearly articulated and I might leave it there because I've got a few other things but I'll let somebody else talk. We can always come back to those. Thank you. Olly. Okay so I helped to facilitate the remote synced remote sensing stream so just some of the insights that came out of our group was the spatial data and spatial imagery like that like getting that isn't the challenge anymore. That used to be you know imagery from satellites used to be quite expensive if you used to get high resolution as a you know in my instance a great grower a few years ago that's now come down to kind of imagery being available like across a whole season for ten dollars a hectare so the price is coming crashing down and it is available so the speakers were really talking about how they're needing and these are technology companies how they've needed on their journeys to really drill down to creating very practical solutions for farmers for problems that they cared about so one example is hummingbird technologies really very advanced AI company that's been really really well backed around the world and they've come to Western Australia and the product that they've found is really gain traction is just actually just doing green on brown sensing so just looking for weeds summer weeds and then creating prescription maps which are extremely frictionless to then go and apply so they spent a lot of time just integrating fully with John Deere so that they're basically sense weed mapping turns into really practical prescription maps and everything fits in kind of a 10 meter sectional control that they're running so that was interesting people like data farming Tim Neil he was very you know upfront about uptake so far so whereas some technologies like auto steering you know might in certain areas of broad-acre farming have an over 50% uptake when you look at actually people making practical use of things like imagery that's down at 4% some of the things that he was saying was like get humans out of the way so a lot of the stuff that he's done which has helped him really scale and bring down the cost is just automating everything so in his previous life they used to be humans in the loop they used to have to do things and he's like he's just been working to build software that just automates automates automates and tries to give farmers really sort of frictionless experiences some of the just a couple of other quick things that I thought were really exciting were Chibo labs so they're actually so a lot of this you obviously got remote sensing and you have to ground truth it I thought Chibo labs have done an amazing job of activating this basically army of farmers to help them ground truth some of the work that they're doing spatially so they have hundreds and hundreds of farmers out there actually monitoring their pasture and that helps them to kind of validate all of their data sets so that tapping into the power of a crowd I thought was really exciting and also the same group of people are working on a tool called my farm key so a lot of the companies were saying that when farmers have to adopt farm management software or spatially-orientated software one of the tasks that you have to do time and time again is draw your blocks in and it's interesting in the livestock industry with this project called my farm key they've just actually gone Australia wide and mapped all of the paddocks that relate to livestock and that's going to sit in a repository which is available for other apps to tap into so ultimately we're kind of creating some assets that can be shared and used by lots of different technology companies which should hopefully help to really just lower the friction when it comes to people actually adopting tech so I thought that was really good as well. Thank you very much Olly, Tom. Yeah thank you so the the sessions that I was looking after were around IOT devices or Internet of Things devices and we had a wide range of different companies presenting different technologies we had Jason Chaffee from Argersons who create the eShepard products so they have basically connected cows and providing the ability to use virtual fencing for those for those cows through to Rob Stevens from Sentech a company that's a proudly South Australian company based here in McGill Road they're a maker of soil moisture probes but now they're connected soil moisture probes so much more than just a hardware manufacturer now they really are a data company that's providing water insights and soil moisture insights for their customers. We heard from Mike and Dan Hayes a company called Intuit based in Naracourt down the southeast and it's interesting their company creates IOT networks and solves a lot of the technical problems with having access to the Internet on properties so that people can access these IOT devices and roll these IOT devices out on their individual properties. After the lunch break we heard from Farm Bot from Andrew Copen they are again they're a water tank monitoring company but they see themselves as much more than that. Andrew described himself as a company or Farm Bot as a company that provides actionable insights for the farmers so they have a very clear understanding of the value proposition they provide. Then we heard from Salah Sukahera from Argersons making farm robots in particular for row crops doing all sorts of interesting application around the autonomous detection of weeds in row crops and then we heard from Laili Rami Sanad and a farmer down at Mount Gambia Josh Clark who's integrated and implemented a fully autonomous dairy milking system on their property. So a wide range of IOT technologies from the relatively simple tank monitoring solution through to a fully autonomous dairy if you like but they all had some similar themes I suppose there was still an underlying theme for particularly a lot of the connected devices around a lack of infrastructure and the requirement to have infrastructure to take advantage of these technologies and in fact into it you could argue their entire business exists because there is not widespread access to that infrastructure so they actually run their business to provide that solution to farmers and the other thing was that people were quite all six companies were quite clear about what the value proposition that they were adding to farmers a bit like you said Andy they either had a dollars per hectare gain or they clearly articulated the problem they were solving so it wasn't technology for technology's sake they were using technology to solve a real problem and the way that they overcame the barriers to adoption for those varying types of companies was interesting and a company like a Sentech or a farm bot they very much had an emphasis on creating a plug-and-play type solution if you like anyone could buy one of these hardware solutions from an elders or they could go to one of their agronomists and they could implement it and make sure that was implemented well through to Laili obviously a much more sophisticated fully autonomous robotic milking program and the way that they cover off that adoption program as they have quite a sophisticated distribution network and support network around Australia and through New Zealand so very interesting topic we could have talked about it all day but that's a quick final review of what we have covered off Leanna. Thank you Tom Emma we've heard comments for obvious reasons about automated systems being crucial and so forth even though let's get the humans out the way but I think you have a strong passion about the what's the human face in all this and it occurred to me I think from some of the talks we've heard this morning and so forth the importance of building trust you know people don't you come along and say I've got the best solution in the world for you if they don't know you don't trust you probably not going to pay much attention whereas from their peers they trust they will work with so could you perhaps talk to us a bit about to start with at least about the human element. Yes I think I think there's various aspects to that one thing that comes through yet again is there's no silver bit bullet because all our farming businesses have got different motivations different structures different environments different production systems so it's so important to actually be able to work with those individual farming businesses but it's not just the farmer and a farmer I just will remind people is not only male do not forget when you're talking to your audience there are women out there I did a survey of 14 businesses and all of them talked about him all the time but we know that a lot of women are actually the ones driving the uptake of the technology so I'm not some raging feminist. How many women producers do we have here today? Probably not that many. That's good to see a number well done. But you know they are in the equation. The other thing is the personalities of those people so some are going to be big risk takers and take it up really early and be prepared to be the guinea pigs but most are actually going to want to see it working and proving a value as we've said many times but their team sorry what was I actually going to say it's not just the farmer there's teams on the farms and if their employees or if their advisors are not engaged with the process as well you are very likely not to have successful uptake so I'd really encourage people to think about the whole we love the term now ecosystem on the farm of all those people that might be engaged or the ones that you can keep out of it as Tim said because they can be the ones that are stopping the uptake. But can I just talk a little bit about the value proposition issue that's come up as well because yeah I'm like a reformed smoker now which is always dangerous and oh but we always say oh yeah we've got to have a per hectare dollar value or whatever the unit dollar value is absolutely we do but that information is important when the farmer is making a decision about adopting but there are two stages before that that we need to remember that they've got to have knowledge and they've got to have persuasion and I think the we've got over 80% uptake of the autos deer in the broad agar cropping systems and people go oh yeah yeah you know it's because we've got less overlap well that's what they originally sold us on 5% 10% less overlap if you have had pretty odd shaped paddocks that's a fairly significant change in your bottom line but really if you think about it what happened was farmers drove around having a sticky beak over the fence other people's paddocks and I went wow those are straight lines that looks neat how did they do it and then they go to the down the pub or the cricket club or whatever oh you know Joe blows got really nice straight lines had they do it oh they're using auto steer and Joe blow goes well I'm actually I'm a lot less tired and I can do more hours and my back's not nearly so bad and then they go oh okay and I get a 5% reduction in input costs because I'm not getting the overlap so it's worth me buying it but you've got to remember all those steps we are all humans we all do that think about your buying decisions and then apply it to your potential clients thanks Emma and we can open up any time for questions so does anyone have a question please at the back I think there are some roving mics Phil Tickle from Cebo Labs there's been the question of subscriptions raised a couple of times and producers apparently you know being annoyed at having to you know add subscriptions and but I haven't actually heard another another model actually put forward if if subscriptions aren't the way to go does anyone have a comment there yeah Phil I don't know yeah obviously there is farmers are used to making as you'll know like big capital investments they used to kind of one off costs and no it is a the SAS model does get a bit of pushback at the moment but but obviously it's like an early stage of of that being adopted but it's interesting there's there's various people that are trying to switch who pays so that's yeah like finding a viable business model which is meeting the problems we're all trying to solve is like that that that is the biggest challenge we all face so obviously people like Tim Neil at data farming's gone down a freemium route so he's made some imagery for free and then and then charged based on usage we're seeing people definitely there's a move towards ag tech companies seeing them like change switching who pays for stuff whether it be of a company you know ad chem come company or or a rural service provider so but it's that's the as you're it's the toughest challenge to for us to overcome as an industry to make all of this actually viable based on the numbers of farmers that we actually have here in Australia yeah yeah certainly in the session I was in so farm management systems most of those systems were subscription and part of the justification was that the system is actually changing really quickly so it actually gives opportunities for subscribers to change within that and because of that dynamic there's actually a premium placed on then service and training that goes along with those systems so look I'm sure the other models out there that work but subscription seems to be in the software systems to be the choice just can you hear me oh sorry so one of the issues that we're finding is that and I think it's the maybe putting into context there we're basically every ag tech company's got their own app now and they're all chasing another 50 bucks a month or whatever the number is and then the producer needs 10 apps on their phone and it all adds up I think there's a there's got to be from the ag tech perspective we should need to be working on API is more than we're working on front ends and to focus on business to business collaboration and and to have those sorts of models sitting underneath some more overarching apps that they get delivered so really it's I think at the moment there's way way way too much focus on you know the next sexy app rather than focusing on a system integration through API's if I could make a comment on that because I tend to agree I think the only other model that I've seen to try and work around that if you're talking about IOT devices is normally for the lower cost discrete IOT devices sometimes they're building the connectivity into the hardware costs so they might have a fixed cost for a say five ten year lifetime but I think also from a hardware point of view the guys that are doing it well are actually understanding that they're being a bit silly if they think that they are going to be the app if they're going to be some of the multinationals by being the platform provider they're much smarter to have those public API's so the data can move from one platform to the other otherwise they're going to be left behind and if they come up with the app then that's great but there's a fair bit of competition out there globally not just in Australia again it's not it this isn't another model field but maybe it's the term subscription I think I'm buying something and so I you know buy and own it okay I don't own it I appreciate that but I don't expect someone then to go and use my data elsewhere I expect to be able to have my data so I can transfer it to a better model that comes along and I think people are very poor on that transparency one of the things I do during a presentation if you're seeing me looking at my phone it's not because I'm bored on Twitter it's because I'm actually looking at your website and seeing whether you're selling me in the presentation what you're telling me on your website and nine times out of the ten ten you tell me much better information in the presentation than you do on your website I have no idea half the time what you're selling me so if I can really understand what I'm going to buy maybe I'll pay a subscription. Any further questions one over here Clem? Thank you very much Clem Fitzgerdon recently appointed to the Board of Agriculture Bureau now Agriculture Bureau across South Australia have a lot of crop walks where new and innovative operations are put out and farmers look at them some adopt them and some don't the challenge of this forum will be to get and adopt the exciting things that are going on I've been around to some of these things and they're really really really exciting but the issue and you mentioned it about risk and risking all these things is not about swinging from the windmill with a piece of rope the risk is financial and all of these things that people struggle to get into even though they'd love to because it's a financial issue and how you can show that this new technology is actually earning the money and then back to the bank and say look what I did could you comment on that place? I think that there's a perennial one that you know return on investment cost benefit how much am I going to put in when am I going to return and so forth Clem so that that came through a lot Emma. Clem I think you're absolutely right but I read an article the other day and a guy said his most stressful week of the year is when he starts seeding because he's not sure whether the rate controller is going to talk to the tractor again this year so I'd actually argue reliability comes before it's a given it's got to give me a return on investment but it's all those other things and I think the farm what is it called Phil sorry my farm property key is possibly one of those real killer apps that are going to help start making some of these other things work together and show us that they are delivering more money but reliability good support back up all of those things are just as important as the dollar value because if it makes me if I have to stop doing something to make that technology work I've lost time not gain time. Any further questions? I just like to ask Ollie a little bit about his networking sessions the agtech meetups it's I think connectivity has been a key theme and I said before if you know someone you're comfortable with them you're more likely to accept what they're saying and and seek their advice so networking is crucial if we try to orchestrate networking so if the government says we're going to pay for a few drinks each night and try and get people along it ain't going to work it seems to me in this sector you are all taking this on board and starting the network of your own development so which is a very positive sign Ollie would you like to give a bit of feedback on how the meets are going? Yeah well I think that while we started the agtech meetups in South Australia about four or five years ago and it really came from like my background is in games in London and we all used to make Facebook games and it's what Facebook apps that you nailed when they first came to London they didn't even have an office they just set us up a meet up group and and and sort of created a platform for us to make games on top of it and it just went absolutely ballistic and I was very excited to be a part of that and then we came over to South Australia about five years ago and it was fascinating like everybody's you know involved in agriculture a few steps away and there was not much of a community there some amazing companies here doing stuff in agriculture but there wasn't sort of people weren't collaborating and getting together so we just thought much just to get to know people we just start meetups and it's really about just trying to bring developers and startups together with farmers and other people in the agtech ecosystem and it's very much from the ground up so everybody's very welcome to join you just have to go on to meetup.com and just look kind of agtech Adelaide and it will surface and then it's growing to about a thousand of us now and it's good with well actually with the help of Emma we've started to try and also go out from Adelaide so the last one was held at lot 14 in the city and we had about 13 companies over from the UK that all got to kind of only a couple of minutes but they all stood up and told us what they're doing and trying to make connections with people here but Emma took us over to the York Peninsula and actually kind of put on a little mini field day for us so actually the meetup community could all get on a bus we had an amazing day around the York Peninsula and Emma's helped us just to get farmers sitting in front of a group of developers and just talking about what they love and what they hate about farming so it's often you know often sometimes people in tech might be working on things that farmers actually really enjoy doing and actually we just need to listen more to farmers about what they actually hate and what really frustrates them it might not be the sexiest thing to work on but it's actually where we should start if we're going to try and actually create something that's viable so completely open next meetup is on the 1st of April and it's going to be kind of about beneficial agriculture so there's another conference coming here about climate change and farming so 1st of April it will be at lot 14 and all three will put on beers and pizzas and stuff so come on along. Now you're talking beer and pizza whoo look unfortunately we're at the end of our time the time goes quickly when you're having fun so may I thank very much our panel members and also for our chairs of the sessions thank you so much for your time and effort and not just in doing the sessions but really helping to organise them the content of them and our speakers thank you very much for participating.