 All right, we have one more speaker before morning tea and it's time to meet Peter McGee. We'll get straight into it Peter was originally from Western New South Wales cropping country where he worked with sheep But he figured out it wasn't for him and he preferred to grow things He spent some time with the eight vegetable seeds research farm then became a motorcycle mechanic and Eventually came to South Australia saw the light obviously Followed the wife right as long as you got here that doesn't matter and fell into almond production at the end of it Talking about what we have learned so far at the locks and research centre and more importantly asking the question What is the future? Please welcome Peter McGee Well one thing I've learned already is that I should have collaborated with the two previous speakers So I'm not going to repeat all the stuff that they've already said Really informant good information there. So If we have a look at the map there, we can see that's just standard eyes map We've been looking at some sections of it that are available on the portal through the agtech initiative To show you the images that we've got the data. We're picking up from it how I'm utilizing that on farm all that sort of thing So a bit of a history lesson So back in the day, this would have been the top of the line how to measure your soil moisture Tentiometers neutron probes g-bugs and That would have been as the as granular as you could get that data to find out where your soil moisture was We're at what sort of irrigation need to put on where you're going to come from for your future planning for your irrigation And it worked very well for what we had so we weren't looking very much at sort of things like drip irrigation back then It was very much large orifice knockers sprinklers They delivered large amounts of water rather quickly. They didn't block up that easily So that was fine. So things have changed a little so With water requirements being what they are now drippy irrigation. We need to look at The delivery of water far more accurately. So some of the things where you've got now Dendromedometers on trees that measure how much the trunks are swelling so they can actually give us What they're taking up of a day how much they're losing through a day and we can measure the stress on the tree That'll allow us to know when the tree will want to water it again How much water we should be putting on and getting less and less water actually bypassing the roots before they can be utilized properly We've got monitoring stations all over the place. I Have quite a lot of tech on farm. It doesn't look like much. It's an aerial. It's a probe But for me the data coming out of it's invaluable So the imaging that was discussed by Andy earlier is showing me where deficiencies are that You don't pick it up easily either I mark one eyeball is still your base your most basic tool walk around your farm See what you're looking at If you can't do an entire farm in a day But you've got a map of it sitting in front of your office Then you could look at it for a minute and say right I want you to go out there and check such and such block B up that row. What's happened to that vine You know, you just start utilizing time much more effectively than just running blind Okay So People used to get this basically is what you'd receive if you had your early me a tech Stuff in the ground to that which giving you some moisture levels bunch of squiggly lines Could be a little bit disconcerting for some people sometimes difficult interpret Where is it that I'm going right where I'm going wrong and typically a little bit behind where you were in any particular day So maybe the best of it you're seeing was yesterday or the day before zero Gation starting to show up in the senses Again still once you learn to use that tool you start looking at where's my magic number if you take the black box one where you can see that there's lines really plunging through the floor and It goes up to another green line where it flattens out That's basically me panicking and pumping water into that block like mad because I was losing my subsoil moisture Now I wouldn't have known to look at the block because in that block unfortunately the The drip tape is buried 30 centimetres underground for an experiment makes it really hard to eyeball Where you're looking at that block The ones where the probes are was above the ground looks much better And if I had a graph here the image of that block that time It's vastly different the bottom one was irrigating nicely the top one was irrigating horribly And I had to change the pattern the frequency and the amount of water I was putting on to bring it up towards harvest And of course got everything nice and wet just in time to dry it out ready for harvest So this is a modern graph It's easy to blocks colored green. I must be doing things right Now that's the scene if I log in in the morning I do most of my looking at the farm in the first five minutes to get to work turn my emails on check out my graphs What's going on? Where do I need to be tomorrow? Of course? I already know what I did yesterday I've got historical data that can utilize but what if we've had a major rain event or a Major heat wave so how does this change the parameter? So that's easy to interpret you look at it. It says green. You know you're on target and The left-hand side is when you can start to drill down into that information. What equipment is telling me that that's fine so is it the Color of the leaves the depth of the soil moisture profile Does it look like that? My irrigation is going to be okay in a couple of days and quite a lot of the maps that you're going to see on the Dashboards of some of these products are a bit predictive as well Especially the some stuff I'm using out of Israel, which is some really interesting stuff. It's The predictive power that's going to give you now that we can have a look at right over the forecast in the next two days You might not have wanted to water but hey, we're supposed to get 15 mil last night, but it's loxton So we've got a half so you're never going to really rely on the predictive power of an algorithm just yet It's getting better. I've seen stuff from Israel. That's coming out. That's nearly accurate out to a month It's scary how good they are getting it. Unfortunately last Thursday. They told me I was going to get 17 mil and we got it 34 nice storm and everyone else is pretty familiar how that went so these Again a bunch of stuff coming together in one platform. So this is the collaborative idea so not only are we using One company's products. We're getting a lot of companies that are joining together so they can come into a dashboard Like the swan system Again, it's all about drilling down into the information in there to find your specific need what you want to get out of the Programs how it's going to work for you. It's worth Chasing them around having a look and seeing what the comparisons are now for my citrus lines They might look different from what you guys might need for the the bitter culture and vice versa. So It's still like the guys are saying a really rapidly growing process program and procedure that just It can be a little bit daunting just following it and I've got so many of these platforms already set up for the portal I'm sort of chasing through and watching change nearly every second day to an update here or This has been added there and it's really really good to see that the progression is happening and it's actually gonna Well, it's evolved would probably be the best word to use So we're getting better understanding what do we want to find out the problems that they guys are pointing to what's difficult for us Where do we need that information? What's going to work? It's Thing in progress yet. We're still make mistakes. I'm still learning how to drive some of this stuff I'm irrigating by phone who isn't these days But I'm also learning that if I haven't got an accurate flow rate recorded for the program The program can't give me an accurate measurement of what I've got to do for water So it's a two-way street. So some of it. We're walking up the hill some of we're going back down picking up We were left off and keep on going But it's the beauty of actually having an alert system that says oh My watering system starting to clog up better go and check a filter if you've got flow meters in It'll tell you exactly where to go. You're saving time If you go the other way are too much water. I must have a blowout if you've got or a leak So if you've got an overhead image that says right that patches a lot more wetter than it should be You don't have to go hunt for it. You know exactly where it is. You're saving time all the tech that we get and it's one of the luck things that Andy said last was We need the time to be able to get the job done We're trying to do more with less of everything because the tighter margins too much to do not being able to actually Get out and do it yourself Stresses you out. You know, you want to be on your block You know, you want to be able to tell right my vines are in as good as Nick as I can make them And if you haven't got that time to get around and do it or you're chasing your tail fixing plumbing problems Or another blowout or not knowing how well your emitters are going in in your drip lines That's where this stuff is invaluable. This is where like the gentleman who from the Barossa I sort of think McLaren vile He's got an issue where his irrigation wasn't inadequate and I'm doing exactly the same thing So the research farm has had 50 odd years of experience here A lot of the equipment hasn't caught up from about the last 30 years mainly because programs have changed stuff like that I've walked into it with a set of open eyes I'm literally haven't been here 12 months So I can walk around the block and see differences already in where I've changed historical patterns where the information that I'm getting is telling me right do this now and If I don't have the historical knowledge of the block that but the guys that I work with do This is the tool I need so that I don't have to go back through books and look at I wedded We bought this last year. How much nitrogen we put on it's there. It's weight So again, this is another collaborative map It gives you some ideas of where you need to be predictives you've got a whole lot of Equipment on the side that we can actually drill down into to get to find out exactly where in that patch of navels I've got adequate water inadequate water nutrition, etc All it does is save me time I don't have to drive around that block look at individual leaves and examine the trees and in that block you would be a bit Stuffed if you didn't know what was going on in there because There's a whole heap of different science on a whole heap of different root root stocks. So nothing's a blanket it's a patchwork quilt and You can really confuse people you go past a tree that looks really yellow I think I've got to get the nitrogen on and the one right next to it's bright green So yeah, a bit of fun working on a research farm. It's definitely not your normal okay, so this is Basically irrigating in the desert and this is what we do in the Riverland anyway without the river we wouldn't be here this is Just how precise we need to be these days Exactly where the water's got to go how much of it what sort of fertilizers in it and Things like if you are going to be using Really good drip tape. Where's your filtration system? How good's that is a back flushing on time if you don't know that then you really are chasing your tail a little bit So one of the things that I'm pushing for at the moment is to bring the farm into the 21st century And I'm starting right at the beginning right at my CIT valve. I'm gonna put in the best filter I can get The cleaner the water the cleaner the emitters the cleaner the emitters the Smaller orifice so I can use in sprinkler jets and not have to worry about going and fixing blocking things Saving time using less water better application Everything that we've got to try and do as an industry doesn't matter if it's viticulture for the culture even broad-scale Farming it as it stands today The efficiencies that we need to have they're coming the tools that we can use Developing it's an exciting time to be alive. I've got a program running over there at the moment that Israelis have set up and it's basically measuring two trees either side of a block and It'll tell the irrigation system. It's time to water. I'm a hands-off Now right now it's still in experimental stages. So it could go Very well. It could go Not so great. And so one of the things I got yesterday was my next set of images from Sures And I can look identical Straight at what that section of the block that's the experiment is and I can look at above it and say that's my section I'm watering and that looks a bit wet and that's their section. They're watering and it looks a bit stressed Now normally I'd panic and throw the water on but I've got to let the computer do that So we'll be watching how that goes but it's the design of it is so that it might look like for a historical Perspective that the trees are stressed But they're actually measuring just how stressed those trees need to be before they can take up the most amount of water with the least amount of irrigation and It'll be revolutionary if this kicks off It'll be just a game changer and it'll make you change the way you think of how your plants work So robotics is something I'm looking at later. So this is the future of where we can be In a little while so robotics is a really young industry so far in Australia for picking fruit There's a young fellow in Victoria who's had a real go at it for oranges as well We've got problems that the human hand is a wondrous thing and it can do things that robots right now cannot do so These are things that hopefully trials on farm might happen at some stage I don't know if I can get a robot on the place to show you how it works. I'd love it. It'll just be fun The guys that are actually starting to do this though It's more about the imaging how to teach a robot to pick a tree is about machine learning And what we're doing with a lot of programs and the university here is machine learning So we're teaching the computers how to recognize the problems or find the product that they need And it's a lot of complicated work at the moment and very experimental But we are getting to the stage of where we will be able to let the computer do a lot of the work for you There's another really nice robot that they've got running around in Tasmania That's basically just a walking platform with a bin in it You wear a beeper on your belt and a conveyor belt follows you past the tree So you don't have to fill up a bag take it back into your bin You just pick apples all day and you put them straight down the elevator that don't never leaves your side It saves time it saved backs You know, I'd really love to give away my picking bag, but I've got Valencia to get off those bloody trees So automation in spraying as well. So this was mentioned as well by Andy. This is where Optics target exactly what you want. So whether it's a fertilizer foliar application or a weed a side application fungicide and canopies Any gaps you simply stop the sprayer you keep going past. It's not particularly new. It's getting better the expense Their systems are expensive, but you can look at saving up to 50% of chemical on any application It adds up over time. It will pay for itself America's got a few bits and pieces going at the moment It's not really picked up in Australia yet mainly because of the overhead costs and the support isn't quite there yet It is going to be coming broad acres using it in spot in their broad-acre spraying all the time now It'll hit harder culture like a bomb when it all kicks off because we all know the costs of our Inputs are going up, especially with the supply problems. We have at the moment any time We can save a dollar there and save time doing the job out there. We're gonna win Next generation robots they can drive the tractors. They can do it all night You'll actually get some sleep at harvest if this thing takes off This is it's very futuristic at the moment, but we see the technology becoming alive Everywhere around the place. Everyone knows how accurate now your GPS is You can use radio locator beacons to be even more accurate directly in your paddocks You can set networks of these up over as big an area as you like Once you've programmed the computer and wants to go around and do it You won't have to worry about misgrows of anything You start to incorporate all this together and the future is looking a bit like Not Terminator, that's a little bit nasty, but we're looking forward to where Some of the things that we can do That we have to do we'll be have to have the time to do it easily because one of these things is running around doing the spraying or something like that We're getting to the stage where that's a bit futuristic. It's my crystal ball again If I ever get one on site, I'd love to show you. It'll be fantastic So these are our collaborators so far that are on farm and they're growing all the time. They're changing. We're evolving so It's a little bit hard to keep track of who's who who's doing what and who's due on Tuesday at five o'clock to do Whatever, but it's never boring. We're all enjoying and it's a great collaborative team. It's working We hope we can help you with anything else that you need to know about it and in which case This is how you get hold of us You can come through the portal and come through the website. You can ring us and poor old Mark skews He's going to be your guide. He's doing the lead research for most of this and putting it all together on farm I'm just the poor old farm manager. I've got to go out and pick some oranges So I'd hope that's not as boring as it would sound it but anyway if you can I just like to Encourage everybody talk to these guys Say what you think you need to find out what they can help you with and the future's Rosie. Okay. Thank you Any questions for Peter before he runs away? Yes, another one down the back there. We'll get microphone down to you again. Thanks, Peter With all his data we're collecting Obviously, we're collecting heaps if we project ourselves forward for 10 years Are we moving our focus of our management from per patch or per vine per tree? Exactly the way we're hitting. Yep The accuracy or the granular data we can collect is actually going to be pointing directly to that sort of thing With the optics we've got we're also looking at the bits that are picking up obvious disease Or nutritional deficiencies. We are literally going to get down to individual vine individual tree We should be able to at by that stage have mapped out what's exactly happening on our properties as accurately as possible. So It's like addressing things like micronutrient problems in soil structures after that or adapting foliar sprays to take care of that sort of thing The robotic stuff that I said before look you can it'll be quite simply the case of you'll target that Particular disease on these particular trees send it out It goes does the job comes back goes big and parks itself at the recharge port But that is exactly where we're going I can already point to on most of the maps that I've got where I've got stumps or I've had a blowout. So Even at this early stage, we're already got the granular data that we can go to row to row to vine to vine not a problem But soon it'll be more of a case of individually managing every vine every tree Each as a complete unit Tony Randall from the SA drought resilience hub just following on from that question Do you think that could apply to broad broad acre farming as well individual plant management? In the broad a key it'll be a little bit less scaled in But the it's simply because of the amount of work that you'd have to do So again, if you're taking the overhead imagery, that'll be some of the best ways to start You would be targeting within say meter by meter square So say you missed I had a blockage on the fertiliser feeder on the on the air seeder or something similar that you'll be able to go and rectify that Post application take an image. See if you've got a nitrogen deficiency. See if you've got a disease patch You know, it's when you start seeing rain like this You might be worried about the take-all or something else like that It might not be as tree to tree and vine to vine as I expect horticulture to turn into but certainly you're going to be Looking at really micro level in hectares. So yeah, I do believe so Hey, Peter just a quick question. Do you think would you guys be open? You know, you're showing some of those amazing kind of autonomous Like Gus the one in almonds and stuff. Do you think would you be open here? It's probably the same as well for that for the Mp like to kind of be a twin city with like Maybe one of the towns that's similar to loxton Maybe in the Central Valley because again like just stuff that's going on in the world a lot of those things seem to be in California and I don't know if it's been under consideration But but they've been starting to twin up with like there's definitely a twin happened for like the Apple industry between the US and and and Great Britain and Stuff's just moving between the two parts of the world and I don't know if that's something you'd be open to but I think they'll be open to it. I wouldn't be the ultimate arbitrator of where the what we do But I can certainly say as a personal thing. I'd love it, you know, and it's the sort of thing where Farming really is a Community thing we don't just all do it for ourselves. We tend to look out for each other and I think we do that internationally as well So yeah, like any sort of collaborative affair that we can come up with that's going to help the Riverland in general or across Australia. We have to look at it in the positive note We can't really sort of just screw up our nose or particular nationalities or anything else like that because when it comes down to farming we all still mother nature slaves we do our best but We've got to help each other where we can so yeah collaborate collaborate Yeah, thanks Pete just on the back of what Ollie's just a question He's asked the collaboration and we look at Central Central Valley in California for what they're doing Picking up on the previous speakers. We've sort of put a fair bit of emphasis on vineyards If we look at what the the amount of budget that the other the state government of the federal government put into Agriculture and just as importantly Agtech. We look at a one-off business in California Let's say Gallo they put in over a hundred million dollars a year in Research and development, but also now a big emphasis on Agtech They have fully autonomous vineyards over there And they also have a budget that you just you just can't jump over. So are we looking at collaboration with you know Other other countries or other businesses You know, I know that Nick in their head of their R&D at Gallo's is very happy to share knowledge But are we do we have an ability to go over there? Do we have an ability to share our knowledge with their knowledge and vice versa at the moment on? It's be much more towards Ben's side of things. So there is I know at the moment for what we're doing We're trying to introduce as much as possible from all over the place Whether or not we actually have an international collaborative going as a direct thing. I think that's more to Ben's very good if Ollie you might have more More knowledge in that space. So is there any comment that you'd like to make? Um, I don't know. No, actually, it's interesting Gallo just you know with the vineyard mapping stuff We've done like Gallo are trying to yeah We've shared what we're doing with them because they were looking at doing exactly the same stuff So yeah, I just it feels like there's again the scale that they have is amazing And like I I was fortunate enough to you know, like we have a just in the wine industry We have that great wine capitals twin between sort Adelaide in South Australia and and Sonoma and Napa and and We got to go out there under that program They do like a bursary that paid for some flights for us to go out to California We did a meet up in California with the with the Agtech community in California shared what was going on It's only small stuff but ground up but shared what this was four years ago. What was going on? Here at the time and then they shared what was going on there and some of the things that now are here with arable and And D3 ag that was when we first saw that out in America and it was like what grows were actually really using so yeah I think that I totally agree the appetites there and like this is the wealth of knowledge and and and all of that automations there if we can and I don't think they realize in America Quite the scale of things that are here and we're on the same challenges and yeah Yeah We're just gonna go one more question and then we can yeah, we'll go to you Thanks for your presentation Ben Haslett here. I'm just wondering we talk about tree to tree or vine to vine type management You can certainly see that on a foliar application scale put a data file into a tractor in a way you go What do you think the future is going to look like on that basis with regard to irrigation? Fertigation because Largely, they're the major inputs that we've got they're the things that we can have a major effect on our vineyards or orchards with How do you imagine that we're going to be watering each plant individually? Watering each plant individually. That's Probably a little bit beyond the scope of what I was thinking I could actually see that being something that may take a form in the future, but it's still be looking Sections to section at least for your major fertilizations and that sort of thing right now with some of the gold tech Irrigation planning systems you can set Everything up to to be scalar to each valve so you you know exactly what's going into your crop for that area Whether or not you could actually do it as a macro level and you find other than that possibly I'd like to see in the In the practice in the field at least as a startup or an experiment I think one of the problems you'll find there is once we start getting into the complexity of having a new single single irrigation point a single tree is that the more plumbing you have the easier this to clog it up So there's a level of where the simplicity of system has to be able to work with you the complexity of the system So yeah, I think where we're looking at at the moment is still for major fertilization irrigation needs We don't be looking at a single valve by valve application But still it's that if that's as granular as we need to be and then still be able to identify other problems It's still till we can use Thanks very much. Thank you