 Good morning everybody, I'm Jay Halada and I'm from Athena Irrigation. As you can probably immediately tell I'm not from around here, based in the accent, I'm actually from Old Dinka Beach, but have been here in Australia about 20 years. And in being in Australia and being a previous viticulturist, I haven't come across a technology like I have with Athena Irrigation. We are a company that's relatively new, been around for just a couple of years. And the concept we have here with our sensor, which is one half of the solution, is that we listen to the plant, is what it boils down to, to help give you a recommendation on whether the plant needs water. It boils down to that. We're almost using the plant as the sensor itself. So what we do here is the sensor every 10 minutes during the day between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. takes readings of the canopy temperature, the ambient temperature, the relative humidity and the solar radiation. And we feed that back to the cloud. In the cloud, then at the end of the day, we have a proprietary algorithm that's been developed on about five years of research coming out of the uni-adelaide viticulture program that is, that develops what we call a vine water index that is specific to each cultivar. So right now we have the solution for the first version that is out for Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz, and that's because that's where the research took place over the course of a season. We'll be coming out over the course of the next year with other varietals to complement that. But to do that, we have to first do the research through the season of how that plant, how that cultivar actually regulates its stomata. So what the sensor is actually doing here is it's monitoring how well the plant is transpiring. So we take a slightly different approach. Instead of monitoring all the detailed inputs from the clone and the rootstock to the soil moisture to the geological profile and the weather, we look for one thing, the output. How well is the plant basically transpiring? And there's a direct correlation from research on how well a plant transpires and its stomatal conductance and how well it regulates its stomata, which goes straight to water use efficiency. It also has a direct correlation to how well it photosynthesizes. So in the case of what we're doing here, what you see is our sensor, which all the deep research that went into this is combined with a simplicity. We're really all about having a very accurate solution that is simple to use. It takes about 10 minutes to install this. And once it's turned on, it starts transmitting data every 10 minutes. And the next thing you do is on any device, your phone, your tablet, your computer, you bring it up and you start looking at the data that's recorded. At the end of the day, then, you can see the vine water index that is basically showing you how well that plant is using its water. And it's not just how well it's using it. We just represent it graphically in an optimal range that is specific to that cultivar. And in the version of the software that's coming out in September, it'll be specific to the cultivar in the phenological stage. Because we recognize that of the major phenological stages, bud burst to flowering, flowering to fruit set, fruit set to verizon, verizon to harvest, each one of those you'll want to manage the water use in very specific ways depending on what's the outcome you're looking for. Better yield, better tannins, better anthocyanins. So what we'll do is we're going to let you dial that in. What is it you're looking for? You're looking for better anthocyanins, better tannins, higher yield. You'll be able to dial that in and then we'll change the optimal range. And you just have to work with your plant knowing your vineyard to keep the irrigation to where the plant stays in the optimal range. It's that simple. So we're really about using great research but giving it to everybody in a very easy to use way. Because we recognize people don't need one more thing to do. One or two of the other things we'll be coming out with in September is the idea that we'll have notifications. Nobody needs one more thing to look at. So if we know, if we can show you graphically that the plant basically is dipping below this optimal range and it needs a drink, it's only a half step away from saying why don't we just send you an SMS or an email that says the plant could use a little water. Now what do you want to do? It's that simple. So we'll be looking at things like that. So what we really try to do is make this simplistic. We try to take, just like your iPhone or your Android phone, which are basically massive computers that are built into a little thing, we wanted to really take some really good deep research and just make it simple. It's that simple. So stop by the booth over there and I'll show you what the screens look like. I've got it running on my iPad. You can use it on your iPhone. You can use it on a computer. I've just got it running on an iPad and it shows me exactly what I need to see if I need to do something with my grapevines. Now I suppose I'll finish with one more thing. One of the interesting things about this is that the research came out of work on Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz out of the Uni Adelaide. It applies to any crop. Plies a lot to irrigated crops, but it even applies to non-irrigated crops. It's a matter of how you intervene with the water if you need to. There'll be some differences there, but for anyone here that is growing more than just wine grapes, we're going to be working with the Perza test bed people to actually expand beyond Cabernet and Shiraz to where we will be adding about seven more varieties, all the big ones you can think of, Chardonnay and Merlot, Grenache, Tempranillo, Sauvignon Blanc, Sauvignon, Pinot Noir. And we're also going to be working up in Loxton and in the Adelaide Hills on adding almonds, avocados, potatoes, Valencia oranges, navel oranges, and two different types of apples. Why? Because those are needed. People need to manage the water better with those. That's just the nature of where climate change is going. So we're going to be adding those. That'll be coming out probably in the next year because or sooner, depending on the crop, we have to go through the season of research first to define how the plants responding to various different water situations and then bake that into the algorithm that sits behind the scenes that provides you this information for each of the crops. So I suppose I'll stop there. What questions do you have? Yes, Nicky. So the system needs to be integrated with a soil moisture monitoring system. Is that correct? No, it doesn't. So the system does not require integration into any other systems at this point. And that's primarily because we're looking at what the plant is doing. Basically, how well is the plant transpiring? No different than you and I sweating or breathing. It's all about how well is the plant keeping itself cool so that it can basically photosynthesize better. And this is all based on just good research. So where this gets back to, we listen to the plant because the plant is taking into account how much water there is. It's taking into account if you have clay, if you have saline in the soil, that kind of stuff. So yeah, we are not dependent on the other technologies, but we fully recognize all those technologies have a very valid place in that. In our case, should you see that a plant requires more irrigation? The next thing you might want to do is get into the details. Start looking at your soil moisture probe. Start looking at the nutrition, things like that. Understand why? What's going on here? Why do we need to get into that? So as Nigel said in his presentation, they've been trialing this at Tall Brick in the last growing season. And you guys are looking for more vineyards to trial this on, hopefully with some funding from Wine Australia. So as I said before, come see me if you're interested in having this trialed on your vineyard. I've had three people come up to me already. So yeah, so to to finish that off with with Nikki, we are past the trial stage with the solution. It's been proven we've probably got about 50 of these out there between the Kunawar and the Barossa. And it's been working very well for a number of vinerans around the place. As a matter of fact, to give you some example of the trials we did down at Wins and Katnoka State for the past two years, we ran side by side trials of using of irrigating based on our sensor and irrigating based on other technologies or just experience in gut feel. And in the cases we had the yield coming out in both trials was the same. The difference though, and this is where it's going to sound goofy, but it's true for Shiraz, they got the exact same yield as before with 75% less water. And the reason for this and for Cabernet, it was only 30% less water. And the sole reason for that is what we're doing is measuring the plant and how well the plant regulates its stomata is what it falls down to. In each one of the cultivars physiologically does it different. And that's just the nature of the research behind it. So there is some really good strong correlation there between how well it regulates itself and what we're actually measuring. So I'm saying at this point the trials have been done with Nigel, he's trialings to see does it work in his system with Swan and integrated together. And so that's where you'll see in his situation there, he's got Nigel actually has eight of our sensors in place. And to get back to one of the questions that came out earlier, how many do you need? Well, it depends on what the variability is in your vineyard. In Nigel's vineyard, he's got six of them in Shiraz. And as you saw in the NDVI images, there was some variability there. So the way you would go about this is looking at that NDVI image, seeing where the hotspots are for lack of a better word, low vigor, high vigor, and place the sensors in those areas or according to your zone to irrigation. So that you can then use the sensor to guide how well you should irrigate in this area versus that area with the intent of bringing it all up to the same level at the end of the year when harvest comes around. So when we, when Nicky talks about doing a trial, we've actually got Wine Australia standing behind us saying they like this so much, they want to encourage the uptake of this across Australia. So what Wine Australia is doing is they're going to be working with us to put a number of these in place in Margaret River, Clara Valley, Barossa, the Riverland, the Grampians, Orange and the Riverina and the Murray. And a few select growers so that we can start to get growers to think a little bit differently about how maybe you look at irrigation by watching the plant. So that's the essence of what Nicky's talking about here is to talk to her to see if you want to get one or two of these in your vineyard there through Wine Australia. Thank you. Thank you. Any more questions over here? Thank you. Just wondering how the decision is made as to which crops get that indexing research done. Cool. How the decision was made. We're a commercial entity and a lot of it had to do with the commercial realities of running a business. So what we looked at was we are Australian based but as you can imagine, this is something that's going to work out I've mentioned it works on any crop. We're already talking to some people in America about the exact same thing. And so what we're looking at is across grapes and then across other irrigated crops we looked at those crops that have two components. One, they have a high application rate requirement of water. And two, what's their coverage as far as hectares go? Now in Australia, there's a certain set of crops that fills into and then like we heard from the Sentech guys and then there's America. You know, just everything's bigger over there. And in this case, there are a lot more hectares of a lot of different crops. So almonds are a big deal here for us and that is sucking a lot of water. It's the same thing in their essential region in California. Avocados, the same thing except maybe not as important here but in the States, lots of avocados in the central California region, same goes for citrus. So that's really what it came down to. When it came down to the grape varieties we looked at the most popular grape varieties. And once again, it was mostly from a commercial reason but we also understand with growers that most of the growers have cab, shiraz, chardonnay, merlot and some of those grapes and we can cover a lot more growers making much better use of the scarce resource, water. That's not gonna get any easier for us. Now the question? The question was about how big of an area does the probe scan? We wanted to be specific about this and the technology when it came to the design of the unit here. The unit, we wanted to make it very small for one. Get it out of the way of trimmers and get it out of the way of spray units, stuff like that. The unit we like to sit about 300 mils above the canopy and you can see it's got two little gimbals hanging off it. Those gimbals embed the IR sensors and we put them inside the gimbals so that spray doesn't get on the lens, it's that simple. Might not be the sexiest looking thing but it protects the IR lens so that spray doesn't get on there because if you get spray on there you're gonna get a bad reading. So what this does is with the IR sensor they only have a 35 degree field of view. Now, side to side. So what we tell you when you install it is install it so that the two gimbals are going down the row. So that's simply that 35 degree field of view will only cover the vines. What we don't wanna do is take the temperature of the dirt. That's not gonna be useful. So we cover just the vines and one of the things you will, you probably figured out at this point is we look at when we're talking to growers and we're telling them, you'll probably put these in around the middle of October when you've got about 10 centimeters because we're looking at the temperature of the leaf and frankly, if there's no leaves, there's nothing to record. So put them in about middle of October when you've got about 10 centimeters. As the canopy grows, you'll probably wanna lift these up throughout the year. So if you were to come by and look at this, you'll see it's just on a simple 40 mil PVC pipe. That's all it needs because that weighs next to nothing. And it's just two timber screws putting it into the post basically. So it's a 10 minute installation to make it happen. And then what you can do is throughout the year, if you need to raise it up to get above that 300 mils up, you can just move the post up with one or two screws and you're back in business. What have you done to overcome the need for reference? Person did this a lot many years ago and found you need a wet piece of fabric as a reference to compare. So we've got two references. The research we did was validated and calibrated against Lycor parameters. So we validated this against what we considered to be the gold standard for looking at the leaves here. So every measurement that was taken from this was calibrated against what we saw in the Lycor parameters and that's baked into the algorithm. That's one piece. The other piece is we wanted to make very sure those IR sensors are really measuring the temperature the way it does. So we've done a lot of, we've done some really good trials on measuring the level of black when it comes to the IR sensors to make sure we're getting as close as we can to pure black and we're measuring it really well. So that's the essence of the calibration we've done and the referencing we've done which starts at the very base with the research in the field. Other questions you might have? I think so. You mentioned you're gonna have different calibrations for different varieties. I just wanted to, how's it affected by like how the vines were pruned, how they're trimmed, how the positions are, the shoot position, all those sort of things. Yep, all those factors are another input that the vine takes into account when it's actually transpiring. And that is one of the things that the vine basically is using as just another thing it has to think about for a lack of a better word. Now that I've been pruned, I'm gonna put more energy into these remaining leaves. If it's putting more energy into these remaining leaves, more energy water, the leaves might be a little bit cooler which could be a good thing. Now, of course you have to balance that with, well now I've got more sun hitting some of these leaves and things like that. So this is where it gets, this is why we're also measuring solar radiation too. That's all part of the equation of how you measure transpiration and how it comes back to stomato conductance and how well physiologically the vines regulate. They're stomata to basically expel oxygen and the other stuff and bring in carbon dioxide. So where the cost structure is similar to what you've seen with a number of others. There is a cost for each sensor and there is a yearly data subscription fee. We've only been out here a year. The current cost we're looking at and I'm gonna give you a range because we're still trying to figure out as far as the true manufacturing cost but it's about 650 to 850 for a sensor. And then it's about $300 a year for the data subscription per sensor. And then it's up to you to understand how many of these would you want to put into your vineyard. As you saw with Nigel, he's got eight of them. He's got six in the Shiraz. We've got a grower down in Kunawara who's got 36 acres. He's got eight of them in his. And that, once again, boiled down to how he wanted to manage it. We've got a number of other growers down there that are saying, I got one, that's good. But why? Because I don't have a lot of variability. I'm good with that.