 Hello and welcome to this tech talk on economics of digital technologies. Our speaker today is Darren Price from Price Rural Management, where he is the director and lead consultant. Darren provides agribusiness, rural advisory and consultancy services to clients and the wider agricultural industry. Darren's expect knowledge and leadership in precision agriculture assists in the delivery of producer awareness and adoption and also the demonstrable impact of precision livestock management. Recently his broad range of experience has proven invaluable in providing input to future strategic direction and program evaluation for companies such as MLA. Thanks Darren. Thanks Jodi and thanks very much to Persa for allowing me to speak today. Welcome everyone to the webinar. As Jodi said, my name is Darren Price. I'm the director of Price Rural Management Proprietary Limited and I am based in New South Wales. Today I just wanted to work through a PowerPoint presentation that will speak to the economics of digital technologies and review a project that I was involved with with MLA and Car Willow Pastoral Company that I managed as a general manager. So my role with Car Willow Pastoral Company for 22 years was as their general manager. I'll talk to you about what Car Willow Pastoral looked like but in 2018 MLA approached Car Willow Pastoral Company through me to help host a digital technology upscale property and or business and the theme was hype or happening in the red meat industry. The media have been saying for many, many years there's plenty of digital technology out there but we wanted through conjunction with MLA's project to actually find out if it was real ready to implement into the livestock sector. So we agreed to participate in the red meat digital forum and host and evaluate various digital technology within a commercial operation. Agreed to provide the sites for industry to view installations and speak to end users and allow installation of new and emerging technology into the future and through that establish what works and what does not work and provide some insight into return on investment and business change opportunity which we'll speak of a little bit down the track. MLA then went out to various technical or digital tech providers with an open call to see what was out there. Come along, bring what you've got and we'll try it out or pit it against people in the same space as you and we will see what washes out of all that. So Cowell, a pastoral company at the moment is four properties based around Canberra and Yassin, Southern New South Wales typically running 900 Angus breeders in their herd supplying feeder trade and restocker markets first cross youth flock of up to 10,000 youths 4,000 lambs generally going to domestic trade or store lambs. It grows winter fodder crops, it has sender pivot irrigation. A small time staff of only four so utilisation of contract labour for specific tasks. Topography ranges from river flats to steep hills elevation of 720 metres to 1250. 700 millimetre rainfall with a frost free period of around four and a half months per annum obviously through the summer period. What was installed throughout the project ended up being about 400 individual devices. To put some clarity around that it did include some smart tags about 120 smart tags on livestock but this little schematic here provided by MLA and Cowell, a pastoral gives you a bit of an idea of all of the various areas that we were looking to gather data across. It was quite a broad based range of devices and widgets that were installed. So there were about 150 companies approached by MLA to come along. In the end there were around 20 odd that came. Some viewed in the first instance viewed what we were trying to do and decided they couldn't achieve what the aim of the project was but those who did came to site and we end up installing solutions as listed there on the screen. So water monitors for troughs, tanks and dams, weather station and rain gauges, diesel tank monitors, soil moisture probes, sheep and cattle tags, gate door and cattle ramp monitors, digital satellite mapping, electronic fence monitors, smoke alarms and shed environmental monitors, vehicle asset, tracking devices, farm management software. We even tried some apary condition monitors. We did some cattle, heat and carving detection, silo level monitors, animal handling systems, satellite pasture imagery and a variety of connectivity options. Lora Wans satellite SIGFOX 3 and 4G. We discovered that you just can't install a $200 sensor and get what you need. There's quite a process going through to decide what you should install, what you need to know and realistically there's a minimum investment required for most providers that are used across the space. It's not just the sensor. It's also communications tower. There's monthly and annual device fees. There's ongoing maintenance. So it's not as simple as just picking it up off the shelf and plug and play sometimes. Many different approaches were applied by suppliers. A lot of these things were put in on the run. Every water trough can be different. Every gateway can be different. Topography ranged as I said in one of the first slides. So there's a few pictures there of communication towers on the left and again across the top. Weather stations, some were concreted. Some were on steel posts. Things deployed inside a dam had a bit of a challenge. But overall, the suppliers worked really hard and really, really quite innovatively to find the correct way to put something in and position it so that it would work within the business. And providers were asked to work together and we felt sharing a data was a bit of a must-have. Everybody came along with their type of dashboard or widget display. Interestingly, I had begun the process hoping to have a universal platform that would provide me with all of the data from all of the providers into one platform rather than having 20 apps or 20 separate dashboards. My view has changed over the last two years around all that. In fact, it changed far earlier than two years ago, in the last two years at least. Probably six months in, I decided that yes, every provider having their own dashboard was a worthwhile thing so that I could do some really deep dive analytics if I want, but also having a universal platform that provided me with the major data sets in a basic way was a valuable thing too. So I think it's a bit of a double whammy there. You need both if you can get them. So what's the digital value proposition? So I've worked through the use of these widgets and platforms and have come up with some use cases that we found with Inca Willow Pastral Company at the time I was there. We're providing some return on investment potential and business practice change. The ones I'll talk about briefly this morning are Water Solutions, Cattle Handling Equipment Incorporating Scales, RFID and AutoDrafter, Smart Tags, Weather, Soil Probes and Irrigation Scheduling, Satellite Pasture Measurement, Some Drone Technology and a really interesting down over the horizon potential with augmented reality reporting. So let's get into those now. With Water Solutions, there's currently 40 sensors installed monitoring dams, troughs and tanks. There's also six kilometres of a river that tends to flood in high rainfall events running through the main property at Kauwula. So we've got river level detection there for floods. We installed Loroan, 3G and SIGFOX connectivity to test all of those. And we found all were equally working well and great accuracy and consistency across all of these types of connectivity modes. So if we just have a look at this screen now, this is a reporting screen by a company called Water Watch Tussik out of New Zealand. I've just started a screenshot for you. So what I'm doing here on the screen is working around the various water points and devices that I would check on a normal water run. And you can do all of this on your screen from your computer in your home or on your mobile phone. Now typically a water run at Kauwula would be five tanks, nine troughs and six dams, so say 20 water points. To do that coverage would be 14 kilometres and take about an hour per check. And in the summer we're doing that seven days a week. So annually approximately 180 days of water checking. The average cost I worked out was around $110 per water check. Nearly $20,000 per annum. We reduced the number of physical checks by 70%. So that pulled it back two runs a week. So you can see that there was quite a saving in the cost of water checking in the business. It's much better. It gives you the ability to utilise your labour units in a different perhaps more productive way. It gave us peace of mind when we were monitoring the river levels that we got an early warning on water rising so we could move stock off and protect those from the flood. This doesn't mean with any of these devices that you can sit back and not ever go out in the paddock. There's always the need to go and physically check these things. However, it is a great device to be able to give you a view of what's going on from a remote situation whether it be in your home. Or like I did, I had a wonderful opportunity to go to Canada last year. And whilst I was away, I was able to view all of this stuff from the other side effectively of the world. And if I sensed there was an issue, I was able to contact staff and get onto it. But they were also able to access this while I was away too. And it gave me a great deal of peace of mind to be able to be off the place but still have that element of oversight. The next one is some cattle handling equipment. Now, being a feeder cattle operation we generally weigh our cattle every four to six weeks. Mob sizes are between 100 and 160 head. A manual weigh and draft takes three staff for processing and we're probably doing about 60 to 80 head per hour. We used to have a manual RFID scanning via a wand to track weight gain. And the manual operation of a draft forward of the scales at a normal crush requires a lot of walking or an extra staff member there to operate a gate. So, you know, it's kind of, it represents a cost and it's a little clunky. So, MLA engaged tapari from New Zealand and installed a three-way drafting crush. It has an auto RFID weighing system. Weight gain info is collected automatically. This was an amazing piece of equipment. As you can see, there's no understanding there at the head bale or at the crush. I'm operating this crush from about 10 metres away with a key fob type device. And the animals basically stand on, walk onto the weigh platform and the air operated gates and draft automatically send them to the correct position based on their weight. And all of that is automatically sent back to the scale head and collected and collated. We had a huge increase in productivity from the old system of 60 to 80 per hour. It allowed us to draft up to 200 head per hour. And there was very, as I said, very little interaction up at the head bale. You'll see me move forward in a minute and prompt the beast to go forward. But very little need for me to be up there all the time. And so it reduced our labour requirement by 30 per cent to do a particular draft. They were obviously allocated. So one person was allocated to other tasks. Cattle walks through calmly. And for the most part, you know, did that all themselves and was highly accurate and consistent weighing. And I can't speak highly enough of how good it worked. It was a very, very efficient system to employ. Of course, you know, this is a system that would cost, you know, $30,000 to install. So you need to have that return on investment. But it would be forthcoming over a period of time. Smart animal tags. Cow willow pastoral has a breeding herd of 1,000 cows. So monitoring animal health aspects is always desirable. We found that we felt there was a use case in tracking cattle movement from a grazing perspective. Tracking bulls during joining could lead to the significant productivity increases. And I felt that was probably where our greatest potential return on investment and practice change would come from. So again, here we have a screenshot of what we are seeing on our PCs in relation to individual tags on cows and bulls. So as you can see, each cow or animal has a tag that's an RFID connected tag with a GPS tracking inside it, has a solar panel on the rear of it to keep the tag charged. And it is able to tell us distance cover of an animal over a period of time. It's able to show us the tracks of all those animals as it's just come up. It even shows you the movement of those animals at a period in time. It tracks the temperature of the animal as well. So it gives us some idea of potential animal health issues. It was a really, really useful bit of gear. It showed us where the animals were focusing on their grazing and where they weren't. So we could make some animal restriction thinking out of that. But in terms of tracking bulls, we found it in the end to be probably the greatest return for us at this stage. Of course, all these devices are still under development ongoing with all of these companies. But if I'm able to, and I was able to track bull activity during a joining period, and if I could increase the carving or at least the conception rates by 5%, five weaners at even $700 ahead is another $3,500 to the bottom line per annum. That has significant return over 1,000 cows. We were able to see bulls that had moved five kilometres and some bulls were moving 23 kilometres, for example, in a daily period. It was a chance to go and find the bulls, and you would be able to exactly pinpoint where they were based on their GPS coordinates of the tag on your screen and do a proper health check on that beast and make sure that he was able to join. Or if there was an issue, you know, in the past we would drive around there and view a bull, for example, and he would be fine. He wouldn't show any signs of a subclinical issue. But we know from experience all of us that bulls do have these problems underlying, might serve two cows and then say, oh, my back's sore, I'm going to sit under a tree. Being able to identify those bulls with those issues would be a huge, huge help. Soil probes and irrigation scheduling. Carwulla has two 23 hectare centre pivot irrigators. We needed to understand, you know, the weather and soil and how it interacts together. We wanted to match this information to the paddock and the crop requirements at the time and give us greater accuracy in scheduling irrigation events. Not only when but how much and refine our water applications and maximise water use efficiency. So Goaner Ag was the company that installed the irrigation soil probes. I should backtrack quickly and give credit to IDS. It was the company that supplied the cattle tags. Goaner Ag did these soil probes. And we were able to track the soil moisture movement looking for the refill point of a crop. And we can see the rise and fall in the moisture and you'll see this again on this screenshot. It really helped us to start looking at our irrigation scheduling. The red dotted line there is the refill point. So every time the water moves down we would then be able to track, okay, now's the time to start watering before we hit the refill point. The relationship of weather and rainfall also had a big impact and changed the water tracking. And there's a bit of a schedule of where the rainfall was happening. We're just using this information constantly in the end of my stay at Kauwula to schedule irrigation events, being proactive and not reactive. And we'd started to see a lot less stress in the plants in the paddock as a result of this and so potentially reduced our production losses. It's worked really, really well. The next step with this would be to link it to some auto start, stop mechanisms or telemetry so that we could be more efficient with the way that we operate our pivots remotely. However, this was a massive leap forward in the way that we were doing our small-scale irrigation. Satellite pasture measurement. So as a grazing business we're always looking at our pasture levels and measuring these and we can make better livestock management decisions when we know what we have in the paddock. It also helps us to identify feed wedge requirements and we would spend considerable time each month moving around the properties and doing the pasture measurements. We needed to have an accurate and objective measurement at low cost. Some of our pasture measurement was quite subjective when done by eye on the run. We would often do it with a probe. However, that was not always the best use of our time. So we were looking for a way of measuring our pasture more efficiently and at a low cost. So this screenshot is a product provided by CBA Labs. So it's a satellite vision of our pastures on the Karwula property. You see me, I'm toggling around and bringing up total standing dry matter measurements. And you simply hold the cursor over a particular paddock and click on it. It will give you your kilograms per hectare, the date that was inputted and how much of the paddocks are 93% in that case or 99% in this case of the paddock area that it was picking up the data across. Scrubby paddocks have less of a percentage of valid data. But you would relate that to what you would see normally in a visual way. On average, we were spending about six hours per month assessing and measuring pasture. And a cost estimate for us was about $8,500 per year. Most of the time we don't have more time than one day per month to spend doing this. The beauty of a product like this is you're able to reassess every week. These are regularly updated I think every three or four days. And so it gives you the ability to look at these very quickly and very often. You've got a variety of screens that you can use as well depending on what your preferred measurement view is. In the 90 seconds of this screen video, we've assessed six paddocks. So the ability to do this quickly and accurately is making a huge difference to the way that pasture management decisions can be made. It's very, very fast, very, very efficient. So there are a few of the examples of the things that I've identified early up as providing some return on investment potential and certainly some use case and business change. And we have done that in business. So I know that these things work. I guess there's always visions for the future. And I'm looking forward to seeing some of these things I've listed here implemented and assessed in business situations. And we're well into that sort of that realm now. So walk-over weighing systems. I can see they're being used regularly in the north of Australia. I can see an application for those. Even the sudden grazing zones, new and emerging sheep and cattle tags, really smart ones. Again, there's quite a few being pushed around and developing as we go along, which is fantastic. Virtual fencing systems for both cattle and sheep. I know that they're, and I'm sure the audience has found virtual fencing for cattle options being spoken of, not many for sheep. So that would be good. Further advancement in irrigation solutions that could potentially link to nutritional inputs as well. That they're always a big bonus to any producer in the irrigation space. Autonomous electric vehicles. They're starting to turn up and have some exciting potential use cases in my view. Augmented reality and drone tech for all the areas of the farm. And I've got a couple of short videos here to show you with those in a second on a couple of projects that I've worked with providers within the MLA framework. And then linking it all together with, you know, high level interactive reporting and analysis platforms so that we can get the absolute most out of these implementations without costing us hours and hours in front of a PC. And of course that helps everybody to continue to build the return on investment and business change paradigms and evidence that it's a pretty exciting space. So a couple of videos now as we head towards the end of the webinar. And this one is a video from a company called Aerodyne. Just have a quick look on normal street. Aerodyne came to Caldweller Pastry Company in 2019 and actually did some field testing and validation of all of the things that you've just seen on that video. Some of the results were very impressive and they continue to roll out their project space with an aim for commercialization soon. So very, very exciting. Plenty of different ways that you can use drones these days and can be quite a cost effective solution. Of course, autonomous flight would be the take home development that everyone would like to be seeing as part of the drone offering regardless of company. So we hope that that sort of thing might be coming in the future as well. The final slide I've got for you is an augmented reality video. I was approached by one of the companies in this space through the MLA project as a way of displaying data on a device whether it be a mobile phone or tablet in the paddock or in your car as you're driving around and I think it's very exciting and I think it could be something of the way of displaying things in the future. So here's the video for augmented reality. So that was presented by a company called Orgd out of Sydney so I thank them very much for those. That just about brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you everybody for listening in and watching this. Everyone will have a very different view of how they will use the technology and what returns on investment and use case and business change there might be but it's a great space, it's an emerging area and I would strongly encourage anyone who's thinking about this to speak to some advisors and build a project and implement it as soon as you can. It's well worth it. Thank you very much. Thanks Darren for sharing your insight and expertise in regard to the economics of digital technologies. The Red Meat and World Growth Program is an initiative of primary industries in reading South Australia and supported by Meet and Last Doc Australia, South Australian Sheet and Cattle Industry Fund and Sheet Connect South Australia.