 Darrell is the Program Manager of Digital Agriculture with MLA. Darrell began his career in the red meat industry with a focus on robotics and automation in the meat processing sector. He joined Meat & Livestock Australia in 2012 where he now leads programs in automation, objective measurement and digital agriculture. Today Darrell will be describing the results from a livestock technology trial Meat & Livestock Australia conducted at Kawala Pastoral Company in southern New South Wales and also at Ramani Pastoral. Thanks Darrell. Welcome everyone. It's the middle of the day and it's always hard. It's the hump period. So hopefully my presentation will uplift everybody. When we're talking this morning Nathan was talking about what excites us. I know everybody talks about how good their job is but my job for the last probably 20 years has been looking at advancing technology across the red meat sector. So my previous role was with CSIRO before coming to MLA. I'm not a farmer. I'll just put that up front. I'm an engineer. So I've been working in the industry for quite a long time. I just want to throw some fast facts up. I always love fast facts. So the global demand for food is growing. We all know that. The world population is on track to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 requiring 70% increase in calories available for consumption. By 2030 the water supply will fall 40% short of meeting global water needs along with rising energy, labour and nutrient costs. Increasing environmental pressures as we all know. Climate change, economic impact, catastrophic weather events, social pressures, more ethical sustainable farm practices and higher standards in farm animal welfare and also the reduced use of chemicals of water. So it should come as no surprise to everybody those facts. You can see on the right-hand side there some facts about Australia. So this is off the MLA website. It shows you that I've got cattle up here but sheep are the same. The slaughter cost for Australia compared to the rest of the world. We're four times higher in our labour costs in Australia than we are against our closest competitor, that's Brazil. And on-farm costs of finishing cattle are the highest in the world. So we need to do something. What's the future of agriculture? Censors and data can yield new growth. The entire Australian agriculture supply chain, we have to embrace technology. We've heard a lot about it today, about technology. The agriculture of the early days, it's in the early days of transformation and we talk about transformation a lot within MLA. And what is transformation? I'll show you a video shortly that shows what we've done in the lamb sector and Nathan started it off earlier on showing that video of work that was done around robotics with Scott Technology. Now I've been with MLA and CSIRA long enough where we started that program of work. So that automation program that we started started in 2004. So it's been going for 16 years. The video that Nathan showed you was probably 10 years old. I'll show you the latest one. The industry could track $50 billion in additional revenue. So this is from the Kenzie report by implementing all these things. So implementing digital transformation, but you've got to have connectivity infrastructure. So that's one of the important things to note. And we all know that coming from remote properties, that connectivity is one of the biggest issues. But I'll show you where we've got to in the off-farm sector and where there's a possibility to trend towards. We think it's pie in the sky stuff and 15 years ago we never thought we'd get to this stage. At the highest levels of food safety and product quality, JBS Australia has developed a reputation as the leading supplier of Australian lamb. Our Brooklyn facility houses a robotic lamb processing system that leads the industry in lamb production. This state-of-the-art system will provide the best possible product for our customers with unrivaled consistency. Before entering the processing system, each carcass is hand inspected by the quality assurance team to ensure the product is of the correct standard. A dual-energy X-ray then scans each individual carcass to determine its skeletal characteristics. The robot uses this data to precisely cut and dissect each carcass. The advantage to our customer is to ensure absolute consistency, minimum waste and maximum yield on high-value cuts. This process also provides our livestock suppliers with valuable data around the fat and bone composition and lean meat yield of the product entering the facility. An advanced 3D scanner also analyses each 4-quarter before precision cuts are made. This process is an industry first and again ensures a maximum yield for every cut of meat. The system runs at a consistent and predictable rate at a maximum of 10 carcasses per minute. Production specifications are fully customizable with the system able to produce square cut or best-end shoulders, rack and loin with rib and flap specifications programmable from 0 to 100 mm in length. The rack, chine and feather bone is removed automatically. Loins can remain as pairs or split into singles. Minimal human contact and reduced sawdust means an expanded shelf life, giving our customers maximum time to sell the product. Our commitment to leading the industry in processing technology puts us in front of our competition. Our clients appreciate the reliability and consistency of our lamb processing and you will know you're getting the best possible meat, service and consistency all the time. So that's where we've got to in lamb. So in every lamb plant we put currently about 40% of the lamb kill in Australia, about 20 million lambs, goes through that system. So there's 13 systems now internationally between Australia and New Zealand have been developed and you can see it's come a long way. Even the blades have changed. We've got circular cutting blades now instead of straight cutting blades. The important thing of this technology is it delivers $7.70 per head increase in value to the processing plants. The other thing that the technology does, we mentioned before that it uses DEXA scanning. DEXA is a dual energy X-ray where it can measure body composition. This is really important around previous speakers have spoken about objective management and value-based pricing. Those systems compared to current manual method of measuring lean meat yield, that system runs at 96%. The current method of measuring lean meat yield, which is the GR location on a lamb, is 20% accurate. So it shows you how accurate those systems are. We'll show you another video. In Australia the bulk of lamb producers end up trading lamb largely on the basis of carcass weight. And they can actually vary a great deal in the amount of sale of meat that's in them. So in effect at retail they're actually very different in value. DEXA stands for Dual X-ray Absorbed Teometry. It's using X-rays to determine how much bone, muscle and fat is in a carcass. A measurement that can estimate lean meat yield and keep up with abattoir chain speed. From a boning room perspective, we get a lot of variance in carcass weight and carcass length and those types of things. What DEXA allows us to do is to analyse those carcasses and then tailor the boning room outcomes for saleable meat yield or lean meat yield. Therefore we can actually choose which carcass is using the cusp base calculator that are suitable for the markets and our customer use out the other end. Apart from running the robots, DEXA allows us to give good meaningful feedback to producers. So the real value for us with DEXA is the feedback we get to understand that we're getting it right on farm. We're not overfeeding our animals, we're not ending up with a fat carcass. That's not good for anyone. It's only not good for the consumers. So what I need is a clear signal about that carcass and that's what DEXA gives us. Clear feedback about what is the saleable meat yield on every carcass. The holy grail for the meat industry is to really enable producers to be paid for the weight and the eating quality of the meat that consumers buy. If fully implemented then the combination of objective carcass measurement and robotic cutting has been estimated to produce as much as $420 million per annum of extra value for the industry and DEXA represents a key component of creating that extra value. Australian sheep meat and lamb is a premium product. So what we need to do is make sure that we're focused on producing the right product for the consumer. So it shows you that it's important to get these animals right because the processing plants are able to measure the meat yield very accurately. Now why is that important? We all know about fat score two and fat score four. I'm not telling you guys anything in this room here. So these are two carcasses that are exactly the same carcass weight. You'll see on the side here we've got two carcasses. On the fat score four, on the fat score two, we look down here showing the saleable meat yield of each of those carcasses. So they sold for the same price. The difference in saleable meat yield was 2.7 kilos between those two carcasses. So when producers are selling this product to the processing plants and you're trading basically on fat score two and fat score four, you get that same price per kilo, the processing plant is now able to measure the exact amount of saleable meat yield coming out. Every one of those carcasses, they're carcass every six seconds. It was mentioned earlier on that eating quality and lean meat yield go in opposite directions. So if you're breeding animals for lean meat yield, you've got to be careful that you're not hindering your eating quality. So MLAs started doing some work around CT measurement. CT can actually measure intermuscular fat. Unfortunately, we can't put a medical CT in every processing plant. They run basically at melting point. You can put a human through a CT system about once every half an hour. We did hear that they were doing some work at the back of every airport. So where your bags get scanned at the back of every airport, it goes through an aviation spec CT system. They run about our line speed. Now what these things are measuring is explosives and drugs. That's what they measure. They don't measure composition of carcasses. MLAs partnered with this company in America called RoughlyScan, who's about number two in the world around airline spec CT systems. And what we have done is develop those images on this side here. And you can see what that is, is measuring IMF. So MLAs concentrating on not only developing technology that can measure carcass value, but also maintaining the eating quality aspect of it by having an objective measurement technology that can do that. So on farm, what's happening? Is it hype or is it happening? What I'm here to talk about also is the engagement that MLA had with two producer companies. Sorry, producers. So it was Carwheel, a pastoral company. We rolled out that as part of our 2018 AGM, which was in Canberra. In 2019, MLA had the AGM at Tamworth. So we engage with a company there called Romani Pastoral. So it's basically to host and evaluate these various digital technologies that we've been hearing coming in the industry that it's been put in to an extent but hasn't really been adopted by industry. We wanted to provide a site where all those installations could be viewed in one location. So you could talk to the end user. And some of these technologies that are emerging, that are coming forward, that aren't quite there yet, we also wanted to look at the return on investment and the business opportunity, not only for the technology companies that develop in this technology, but also for these businesses that install them. So MLA went out to technology suppliers with what we call an open call to see what was out there. This is just an overview of Carwheel, a pastoral. You can see it's situated east of Canberra, north of Yass. It's got an angle, it's heard of 900 breeders. A youth flock of 10,000 youths, 4,000 lambs. They have winter fodder crops, full-time staff are 4. It ranges from River Flats to Steep Hills, the rainfall, frost period, blah, blah, blah. So that's an overview of Carwheel, a pastoral. Ramani Pastoral, this is an overview of the properties that they own. It's owned by an international banker but run by farm managers, so dedicated farm managers. So the properties that we put the technology on was Windy Station and also Gorangular near Hardin. So they were the two parts of their business where we installed the tech. So this is a list of the tech that we installed on both Ramani and Carwheel. So the whole list there is what we put on. So we weren't going to do it any half measures in it. We just thought we'd just throw some money out and see how these things operate in a commercial environment. So I'll just go through some of the tech that we've put on. So the water solution. So currently, this is from Carwheel. So this is data from Carwheel. So there was 40 sensors that were installed through different providers. So we just didn't go with one provider. They're monitoring dams, troughs and tanks. Also the river levels for flood detection. It included a mixture of connectivity from Laura to 3G and SIGFOX. All the systems seem to work pretty much similar to each other. So a normal day for the staff at Carwheeler were checking five tanks, nine troughs and six dams and 20 water points. They travelled approximately 14 kilometers per day. Taken about an hour to check and that was seven days a week. So approximately 180 days and the average cost to run the business is about $110 per run. So about $20 a year was cost them to do that work around the water solutions. They've reduced the number of physical checks by 70%. So two water runs per week. So it's a good cost saving to the company. And it's what we call one of our less complex use cases. So with the water monitoring, you know how many dams you have, how long it takes you, how much fuel you use, how much weight you have on your vehicles. So that's quite an easy calculation to work out. Animal tags, we've heard some, Emily before me talking about tags on animals. So the chips and body sensors, we've put tags on that measure temperature, pulse, blood pressure and other indicates that detected illness early, preventing infection through the herd. There's already use of ear tag technology which monitors those health. Also the location you can see here, the movement of the animals around the property. Carwurla's breeding herd has a thousand cows. They track their movement with the tags. They also track the bulls during the joining period, which according to the staff led to significant productivity improvements. So if you just look at what they did here at Carwurla, a 5% increase identifying bull issues gave them a good return on investment. So it equated to about $3,500 per year improvement in productivity. Soil probes, we mainly will concentrate with the soil probes at Carwurla. They have two 23 hectare centre pivot irrigators. So they need to understand the weather and soil moisture and max this to the paddock and crop requirements. They want a greater accuracy in scheduling their irrigation events. Their aim was to refine the water applications to maximise their water efficiency, obviously. So they're able to track the soil moisture. They're looking at the refill points for the crop. They can see a rise and fall of the moisture in the profile. They can access how long the decline of the moisture is taken and begin to predict what they'll see and go on forward. So the relationship of weather affects the temperature, rainfall, track water use efficiency. So they're using this information to schedule their watering. So they're being proactive, not reactive. So they're no longer seeing that water stress in that pivot irrigator paddock. Satellite pasture management. So this is some work we did with Cebo Labs. As grazing businesses, we constantly need to measure our pastures. We're better able to make livestock management decisions when we know what we have in the paddock, of course. So there's considerable time each month spent assessing and measuring the pasture. So they need to have an objective measurement of that at a lower cost. They were spending car wheeler, spending about six hours per month, assessing and measuring their pasture. So their cost estimate is about $700 assessment, so equated to about $8,500 per year. So they only do that now once a month at car wheeler. So they can look at these updates on a regular basis. So basically, the dashboards that they have at car wheeler, they very rarely get out and about. They look at all this information as it comes available to them on their dashboards that they have. In the video time that we have here, they've just accessed six paddocks, connect this to feed budgeting tools, and they have even a more powerful tool. The project that the MLA looked at was autonomous vehicles, another area of development that we're seeing around the world. This is a company that provide vehicles to the American Defence Force. So it's an American company called HDT. The vehicle that you see there is what they call their Hunter Wolf. It's an unmanned vehicle that is used by the American military to track in front of soldiers with a device on the front, a flaying tool on the front. It actually digs up the ground down to about 100mm to detect the landmine. So the soldiers walk behind this device. Obviously if it detects a landmine, it explodes it. The soldiers aren't injured. It has a return to base. So if anyone is injured, it doesn't take another soldier out of the equation. They actually just lump them on this and it returns home under full GPS control. So this device does have full GPS. It's lightweight. You can see we've trialled it. We trialled it, herding cattle. It actually has a, you see on the left-hand side, it has a drone platform on it. They actually have a tethered drone on it. So this device can run under electric or diesel operation. So it can go about, I think, 1000km it can run under full GPS control. It can put up a tethered drone in the air for detecting things like wild dogs, pests and even looking for weeds and paddocks. And this is in the early stages of development. We do have this machine here. You'll see the number 21 on it. There was 20 of them built for the American Defence Force. We ended up with number 21. So it was a multi-multi-million dollar development by the American Defence Force and we piggy-backed off their investment to get this device. So it'll be displayed at our AGM, sorry, Beef Australia in Rockhampton this year. So where to now? So if you look at what we did at Karwula, we did have, MLA had plans that were going to replicate that investment in future years. So each year we were going to pick a property in a different location in Australia and we were going to roll out the next stage of all those bits of technology to a different property. It was highlighted after the last investment we did that we were going to take a breath. We're going to pause for a period of time rather than do another investment. One of the things that come out was the diversity in farm size, location, business structure of producer properties across Australia and behaviour as an appetite to risk affects the adoption and uptake of this technology. And it does require further investigation just beyond the technology platforms that we were rolling out. So we've actually learnt something from those investments today. Some of the risks, this has come out of a report, directly out of a report that we did after the Karwula and Romani installation. So industry is reluctant to deploy technology due to overstated benefits or readiness claims and all the hardware that is not commercially robust. Producers are not aware of the options and benefits of deploying digital solutions within their business and it confuses which solution vendor to engage with. I'm sure these all can relate to some of these facts. So there's a need to develop targeted value propositions. MLA has just completed a project with KPMG and another company called Greenleaf who do what we call our cost-benefit analysis in our return on investment models to look at different producer segments and their business models for digital agriculture and based on their diverse needs. Part of the next stage of the project won't develop an industry-specific maturity assessment method to support the farms to evaluate their own needs and jobs to be done considering that feed forward and feed back process because that's going to be imperative in the future. The data that you guys get back is additionally as important as the data that's going to feed forward. So around things like lean meat yield and eating quality, how long the animal's been in the paddock, the diseases, all the rest of it. So this will enable to make informed decisions about technology product and other service options undepend by these value propositions that we're carrying out. So, yeah, and it's based around individual circumstances, like before it's up the top, farm size, location, business structure and financial position and attitude to the technology. So all that it needs to be accounted for in these models in going forward. So thank you for having me here today. I really appreciate everybody coming and I'll welcome any questions. I should just add that we're currently under the red meat wool growth program and a partnership between Elders and Prime Industries and Regions setting up the best practice farm down at Struan and Kaibi Bowlight and MLA has co-funded the co-innovation officer down at Struan who will be responsible for the extension of the findings from that farm and some of that demonstration of the value proposition that Daryl was speaking about. So please stay tuned for that. There'll be visual tours, virtual tours and so forth developed so that you won't actually have to attend the farm to actually be able to see what's happening down there. But are there any questions on what Daryl has shown you today? Tal, you mentioned at Kaurwula there was a couple of soil moisture probes set up in irrigated situations. But what about dryland situations? And if so, how was that information being used for decision-making? Yeah, interesting the use of the, I'll answer it in two ways. At Kaurwula it was in the Pivotea irrigated paddock. At Ramani it was out in an open paddock and definitely we saw a better use of it and application of it in the Pivotea irrigator as opposed to what Ramani we used in an open paddock because as you know the soil changes between all those different paddocks. So the interesting learnings is some of this technology that applies to some farms doesn't apply to other farms and that was a good example at Ramani that they didn't see a huge amount of value in sticking it in their paddock because it changed so much between different paddocks they had but certainly at Kaurwula they were able to utilise it more effectively. Interesting thing we were talking about before, I know Emily mentioned that they put one of the sensors up on a star picket. One of the interesting findings is when we got all these technology providers to Ramani they installed all their bits of hardware and one of the providers put a soil moisture probe in the middle of a paddock with some bulls and decided they were going to put it on a star picket with just a pretty basic fence around it. Part of the learnings for them was that it stopped working obviously so we sent them a photo of it and the bulls had sort of played with it like a soccer ball around the oval entangled in all this chicken wire basically. So we stipulated that each of the tech that was on the farm had to be enclosed in like rails, cattle rails but amazing you have these commercial companies that are out there selling commercial equipment and they had no idea how to install it on the property. So some of these learnings that you get are quite funny and they said well as part of the brief you didn't tell us we had to put any safety gear around the sensor and we said no but in the brief it says you have to repair it if it's broken so you can come back every week and fix it if you like. They soon put up the fence of course. So here in South Australia we've got some producer tech groups we've got agtech rebates and stuff and as part of that we have to put an agtech adoption plan together and so I've just sort of considered what our problems we have on farm and what technology we're going to implement to fix them. When you worked with those farms and like Kabul is quite a reputable farm in its region did you sit down with the business owners and work through what their problems were and what technology you'd be able to find alleviate them and then do return on the investment type? Yeah as we're finding out and why we did pause I suppose the investment was it was quite different between what we'd put in at Karwula as opposed to what we'd put in at Ramani. Karwula had opening and gate closing facility on sensors on their property and of course we went to Ramani and they said well what are we going to do with them? We have cattle grids and we went okay well yep we go to the properties and we do talk to them about what we've done in the past and just those figures that I was reading out that was from the manager of Karwula Darren Price at the time so we take those figures to the next investment and talk to them about what their preferences are. One of the learnings that we did an additional learning we had was around the water management where we went from Karwula to Ramani with the water management. Now water management is pretty much a given you know you can pretty easy calculate out the return on investment based on number of troughs and tanks and driving time. The investment that we had at Ramani we engaged with it they have a hundred troughs on their property so we said we were going to have ten providers with ten troughs each so we can compare these different providers which is what we wanted out of it. The problem was it was an absolute pain in the backside for Ramani because they've got all these they've got ten different providers providing hardware to each of these troughs so when one broke down they've gone well who owns this sensor like it's you know who and who do I contact and so you know it's not just looking at the return on investment you have to look at the business case of each of those properties and yeah we do discuss it but in the end they make they usually make and even around the connectivity you know there was a spread between Laura 3G so we look at the landscape of the property to look at you know what connectivity they need in those different aspects of the business I think it probably demonstrates the importance of really thinking about what you need the technology to achieve within your own business and think about what the doing your research I guess as to what each of the suppliers do adequately supply and again what backup service they offer to be able to ensure that you can make it work for you Yeah KPMG is actually building us a ROI tool they will they will be displaying that at Beef Australia this year so it'll producers can come along and have a play with it so they can enter data in around water management, pasture management and livestock management enter in their data and their property details and it'll spit out sort of what the return on investments can be and I should just say Darryl will also be here all day and also here today is our Co-innovation Officer from the Struan farm so if you would like to come and talk about what's happening down at the best practice farm at Struan Robin is your lady, Robin Terry I guess that the probably the just touch on the fact that the the farm at Struan is around demonstrating that tech that is available commercially not so much the blue sky tech so I guess we will have to leave it there Darryl we're a bit behind schedule but please join me in thanking Darryl