 Time to get our first guest speaker up for the day, which is discussing how Agtech has improved profitability and productivity. Oli Majut will be sharing some personal experiences from his work in this area. Oli has a family vineyard in McLarenvale, and he's made the mad dash up here this morning, I think, as well, and just made it on time as well. He's the co-founder of Agtech Startup Platform. He also runs Adelaide Agtech Meetups and is a member of the Agtech advisory board for Perza. Oli is an Agtech mentor and has used his vineyard for tech trials, including work with the University of Adelaide and CSIRO. Please welcome Oli Majut. Lovely. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me as well. So I'll kind of jump straight into it. So thank you. As you mentioned, yeah, I'm a great grower in McLarenvale, Grower for Treasury. Been doing it for about six years now. My previous life was back in London. I used to be one of the founders of a game studio. So we made games for Facebook. So this was a game called I Am Player, which I produced, which let you play the life of a footballer. This was a really exciting time in games. It was a moment when Facebook, if you remember kind of Facebook on your desktop PC and you used to play games like there were like, there were farming games. There was kind of the early Candy Crush games. Like this whole space absolutely like flew for a few years. And we rode the back of that. And actually just thinking about what happened kind of coming up here in those days, is Facebook did something that is, was the first time I'd experienced it, which is actually quite equivalent to what's going in here. So one of Facebook's absolute moments of genius was when they expanded into London, they didn't really grow a team in London, but they started Facebook developer garages. So it was literally meetings like this. So everybody who wanted to make stuff to go on Facebook would be able to get in the room together. They'd put on pizza and beer and help us to understand about the platform that they were building and how we could integrate into it. And like they grew an amazing ecosystem of developers who helped them to raise the whole of Facebook up. And they did that very, very collaboratively. You know, we had Zuckerberg over in London coming to present to us in the early days before we ended up turning into a douche bag that he is now. But yet amazing. Like back then, super, super, super supportive of us. And actually I can see a lot of analogies of what they've done with what is going on in this whole ag tech space at the moment. And it is really exciting when tech, when this kind of works and the ecosystem works and as a developer you have somewhere that you publish your technology and it scales, it's a really exciting place to be. And as you'll see, we're not quite there in the ag tech space quite yet, but I do believe we're on that journey. So with that experience that we'd had in London with the Facebook developer garages, that's what actually led us to starting our meetup group here. And that was literally just to bring these worlds together like I'm talking to you guys now. So I have had a foot in the technology space in my past. Now I have a boot on the ground in farming. So I've been fortunate enough to have a little bit of experience in both those worlds, but not enough developers spend time on farms. And it's really, yeah, and it, you know, those worlds don't often collide, which is why we started our meetup group. This is us over in Mainland in the Air Peninsula a couple of years ago. We came over to see Ben at Woollinook Farms and a whole load of the Costa Brothers and the Armand Innovation Center. A couple of months ago we're going to the Northern Adelaide Plains to meet the Osvej growers next week and meet them at Cracker Market. So the group's about 2,000 people now. So yeah, Agtech Meetup Group. So you're welcome to be a part of it. And it's something that we're doing like with support from Perza to help grow this ecosystem from the ground up. And you know what I was saying? Like, you know, the trajectory of this space and where's it at? So this is actually a graph that shows the stages of when teams form like teams go through stages and they go through these stages of like storming, forming, storming, performing and norming. And you can, again, I like sort of frameworks to help my mind make sense of a few of these things. So, and again, I can see a lot of analogies with everybody's experience in Agtech to this. So again, in the early days, you know, when things come together just like the early days of Agtech, I'd say probably five from kind of three to five, six years ago, there was this real excitement about the potential of digital technology in agriculture. You get, and again, you get all this energy and there's a sudden burst of money in there and enthusiasm and, but what happens is you go through this basically this trough, it's the storming phase and that trough happens typically when there is often a lot of chaos and it happens when people try to kind of own like in agriculture. There's been various people in this journey that have tried to do a Facebook on agriculture and basically kind of own the data of agriculture. That thankfully hasn't ended up working out. But in so doing so, it's actually created an ecosystem that is often not very functional. And it's why, you know, you guys will probably have different bits of Agtech on your farms. You'll have lots of point solutions that typically work really, really well. So there'll be stuff that will serve solve real problems for you. So it might be stuff from like green brain and soil moisture monitors. It might be certain bits of imagery that you get. It might be things that control your irrigation system. But these things that stand alone, like they don't need anything else, are what has been generally providing us the most value. But for an ecosystem to really work, you actually need to get things starting to like fit together. And I'll talk about what we're starting to see which is helping to drive that. But again, because I kind of have that foot in both worlds, I wanted to share, you know, when we're startups and like to show that actually we're kind of all in this, we are all in this together. So we are genuinely aligned, the developer community with the farming community. And I would say that pretty much this space, you know, like I spent the world in things like bloody ad tech, where you're making technology just to advertise shit to people. It's the most soulless industry in the world and it's like everybody's just in it for the money. If you meet people who are developing technology and farming, you very, very quickly see those of us that are doing this for real reasons. We're doing this because it's purposeful. So like, and people want to create a positive outcome for agriculture. And like, this is the only goal of a startup is basically to figure out, and you generally don't know what you're doing at the start, but you're trying to figure out what is the right thing to build? Cause you can build so many things now, but it's like, what is actually the right thing to build? And the right thing to build is what actually farmers genuinely want and need and are prepared to pay for. And the challenge with a, you know, from us in the startup world, especially, is we're trying to figure that out before we run out of money. So unlike lots of other parts of the world, like the research, you know, the research world is amazing, but they often now have a little bit more time than we do to figure stuff out. Normally, we have like about six months of oxygen left before we die. So we're trying to do this super quickly. And again, I don't know if any of you got, you know, paper and pencils in front of you, but I wanted to show you what we typically do from the startup or from the tech side to figure out what on earth it is that we should build and why. And it would be great if you could just take a moment at some point today and just to start to think about some of these things. So this is like, they love a canvas in the startup world. This is the value proposition canvas, but basically forget about the name of it. The important things are that on this right hand side, the idea is that you list out all your jobs, you know, the jobs to be done. So if you think like nobody ever wants to kind of start using technologies, technology for technology's sake, very, very, very few people do that, probably only 5% of the world. Most people are investing and starting to use technology because it's helping them to get a job done. So it's really, really good exercise to do, just to literally just start thinking about the jobs that you have to do. So right now as a great grower this week, we've got, you know, we'll be doing our jobs to be done are things like pest and disease monitoring that then informs, that's done by one person. That's got to then inform me, who then has to inform my spray contractor, what to spray and, you know, there's other things going on in my decision making about the EL stage that our vines are out and what I'm allowed to spray and what I should spray and then I'm thinking about, I have been thinking about irrigation until it rained and so I've got all these jobs and I employ technology or I employ people to carry out those jobs. I don't go and get technology or I don't bring people in because they're expensive if there genuinely isn't a job to be done. So we almost hold that at our heart and when we think about jobs, some of these jobs have ended up being super painful. So for us in McLaren Vale, pruning was super painful this year. I only got pruned like, God, it was like the early September when finally we got some pruners to turn up on our vineyard. Worst pruning job I've ever had done, cost me a third more than it's ever cost me, terrible. So that is proper, proper pain. And that's another learning from us from the AgTech ecosystem side is genuinely, none of us actually want to adopt technology, the majority of us, unless there is a genuinely painful problem. So it's not just like a little kind of problem, it's when something actually hurts. So pruning hurt, I'm sure. Well, when we came up and saw Ben, you were saying how hard it was to get the labor force here to pick your oranges when we were here a few months ago. I would imagine that fruit fly is very, very painful for you at the moment. They're the things that actually genuinely drive change and drive technology. And then we have the kind of the nicer side, which is the gains we're all looking to achieve. Often everybody just completely focuses on production gains. And everybody's trying to eke out the next 5%, the next 10%, in broad acre, they're often trying to just pull out the next couple of percent. But as well as those production gains, absolutely at the heart of that is like, for me, a lot of the gains with technology that we've used on our farm have just been giving me time back. Like when we first took over the vineyard, I had to go out, like our irrigation control box was manual. I had to go out literally every time we needed to do a new shift. I would go out to the box and have to kind of turn a dial and start things. And like, it was an absolute killer. The best thing I've ever got for me as tech on our vineyard has been stuff to do with water. So it's been like a Talgill irrigation controller, which I think you guys have here as well, and a little app on my phone. And I can now basically turn my irrigation programs on, off the fertilizer, everything. I can monitor my flow rate so I can actually see if things are not working. First couple of seasons, honestly, I'm terrible. Because I'm quite busy sometimes. I went for a good month in the middle of summer with a whole bloody areas of rows, not watering, which were like, and I just never really picked it up until it was too late. Now, all of those mistakes that I had made, I'm now not making because my phone helps me to see stuff. So that's the world. Again, I've run out of water allocation with weeks to go and now I can see the burn down chart. I use swan systems as well to kind of have a whole view of everything. That's the first bit of tech I've seen in irrigation to join up what's coming from our Sentec and Greenbrain Soil Moisture Monitors to help actually inform the decisions that I make. But I still go and turn on everything via the app. But yeah, it's starting to join up. And this is the job of a startup. So when startups do get a good understanding of what was on that right-hand side, the jobs to be done, your pains and your gains, a startup then has to design a proposition that basically their product and services have to actually help you do those jobs. They've got to relieve those pains and create those gains. That's like this magic thing. And you feel it, you know, like when you do use software and occasionally like zero is a classic example in the small business accounting world where there is a perfect fit between people's pains and gains and jobs and what that software does. Very few bits of Agtech have genuine fit, to be honest with you, just at the moment. And that needs iteration. It really needs both worlds to lean in and help to understand and exchange like what is not working. And also from us as growers to not always, it's really important to help the developer world doesn't understand what is kind of a little bit painful and what's very painful. So often what derails people is you get this flood of information about I wish you could do this, I wish you could do this, I wish you could do this. Tons of those things are not really painful. The startup needs to find out what is genuinely painful and that you will want to actually pay for. Like unless they get to the nugget of that everything else is just window dressing. So with feedback to startups and there's some fantastic people next door, really try and help to get, if you can spare the time help them to get to that point where you can show them if and where they're really solving proper pain. If they're not solving something that's genuinely painful, tell them early so they either do something different or, because we all have, this is again what like, we have this bloody startup founders, we have this vision. So they all tell you about getting this North Star and you're aiming off there. But so you have this vision that you're going after but obviously the reality in the world is nothing like that and we have to kind of iterate and pivot and change our direction and so it's a bumpy ride. A lot of the companies that are next door have survived a shed load of those pitfalls and challenges which is why they're at a point to be on the farm and Mark's happy for them to be showcased to people. Tons of stuff dies early on but yeah, again even with the tech there, like they're on a journey none of their products are finished. So yeah, help to work with them and we need to all understand like they won't, nobody gets this right first time, like nobody does. So that's my kind of, that's my hopefully a little bit of like what's it like in the startup world and very quickly I just wanted to share my own journey with a little app that we made that started with a problem on our farm which was painful to me. So again, like most of you here in the Riverland in McClarenvale, we have small simple tractors all under 100 horsepower, typically no technology on them first season. This was some imagery from data farming. There's incredibly imagery out there. We've got like deep planet here, got series imagery here. You know, there's lots of other fixed wing people like Spectera, like amazing imagery now. This is from data farming for us. So this data farming imagery, like imagery on my first year used to cost like $35 a hectare or something like that. Now it's, I think this imagery is probably like $10 a hectare comes from space, each pixel is about 50 centimeters which is just like amazing progress that's happened with imagery from space in an incredibly short time. So I can see, like you can see here, like I basically have a, there's a soil change here but I didn't understand because I didn't know this vineyard when I first came on but basically this back triangle here needs help. Here I basically don't need to help it anymore. And one of the things that I wanted to do in that first winter was to apply mulch. So woody mulch to help that struggling area. Expensive exercise cost about three grand a hectare. So I, and I couldn't afford to blanket the whole vineyard. So I had to target it. So what I ended up poor old Scott, our contractor, he just got a print out. So I had this amazing data from, from Specter in that first year, but like that amazing data just got printed off my printer, given to Scott. I tied up flagging tape everywhere. Scott had to try and work out what I was trying to tell him what to do was he went up to that flagging point or not. Off the back of that, we, we just developed platform just to start around something that I found quite, I found it annoying. It is possible. Like it's not super. It's one of these things actually. Platform isn't solving a super painful problem yet. It's just solving an annoying thing about having to tie flagging tape. But so we allow people to, basically pull that imagery onto an everyday smart device, tap out where they want work doing. They can then share that, that work with somebody who's driving in a tractor, extremely simple. And it just tells the tractor operator to start work, to start work, or to change rate. So seems incredibly simple, comes compared to some of the amazing stuff that people do out there in the tech world. But we are dependent on, so you know what I was saying? Like lots of good stuff that's amazing. It all stands alone and it works. We rely on imagery providers like data farming to give us imagery. And it's only two points in a chain. We just need to get this image from them to us. Like have we in three years been able to get that automated frictionless, like it drives me mad. Like we still coming into the first imagery capture in November, still don't have this imagery, still behind the scenes. Every farmer that uses platform, magically behind the scenes to give you honest truth. We're pulling imagery around, pushing it on a different server. It's all being hidden, but it's not working in a really scalable way. Cause we haven't been able to, like the world who provides us with imagery hasn't been able to kind of really think about the chain that they sit in. And there is an amazing company we've met in the US called Leaf Agriculture who are incredibly good at actually being developer friendly, but the imagery they create is crap. So we've got this, we've got amazing imagery from Australian startups, but they can't integrate with it. And then we've got this amazing tech from America where you don't understand vineyards, just give you an image you can't make head or tail of. So that is how hard it is on the ground. So how am I gonna wrap up? Cause I must be almost out of time, I guess. So how are we gonna get to this norming phase? And this is actually where I think we are at the moment. So the norming phase is actually about like starting to get specifications that we all understand, things starting to work together. I don't know, there's a startup, I don't think they're gonna be here cause they're interstate, but they're called Pear Tree. So Pear Tree is winning loads of awards at the moment. It's a dashboard for farmers that helps lots and lots of different services that you use just literally come into one dashboard. It just does that one thing. It gets lots of different bits of information for you, sticks it onto a webpage for you. Yeah, winning like world ag tech solution cause like they genuinely are helping the industry around this norming problem. So this is actually a project that we kicked off with Tim probably about a year ago now, 18 months ago, to put in place the mapping standards. So we got frustrated as a platform with this just not working in wine. So we're just struggling along, it's not scaling. We've been doing it for a few years. So we decided rather than just moaning that we'd get on with it, we'd basically bring everybody in the industry together to start working through what were the most important features of a map, to what was the most important features and infrastructure of a vineyard to map and then get on with doing that in an open way. So this is Ben Castine who might be here today from Claire. So we had like Taylor's, Ben, we've got, we got Hans from Penley here in the Kunawara. So loads of different growers, Perna who came and got involved, wine Australia got involved. They basically helped us to decide what was important to map on our vineyards. We then, again, it's not, none of it's rocket science. It's just never been documented properly. So a vineyard is made up of a collection of blocks. Blocks are a collection of vine rows and vine rows are a collection of vines. And in a vine row, we have posts that goes typically sequentially down the row and then we have these different zones. We have a mid-row zone, we have a canopy zone, we have an undervine zone. And then with the help of wine Australia, we've then gone on another step and made that starting to be developer friendly. So we've taken this, we've got a shared understanding of what a vineyard is from a mapping perspective. We've started to do some geeky stuff to make it developer friendly. We've published it in places like GitHub, which is where developers go to get stuff. We've worked with Airborne Logic to start to work out how to map vineyards in a really, really standardized way. So they can be surveyed super accurately. This is us doing some trials on the vineyard as well. And once we got like super accurate vineyards in the system, this is our dream for platform. This is what platform would look like if it really, really worked, that we would snap you to exactly the right row. You know, just on your phone, it would fill in as you spray in the middle of the night. You'll never miss a row. You'll never miss a row when you harvest. We need that, like we need this base stuff. We need this mapping layer to be correct. So, and again, all of this amazing stuff you'll start to see as growers in the industry around data that's captured from tractor mounted or our gate-mounted computer vision systems. Lots of it's being trialled. Some of it's really interesting. Gonna, once we've got the structure in place, that data can now go against the right point on a vineyard. And again, to help us with lots of different things we have to learn about sustainability-wise about how we baseline our soil carbon, for example. We need to baseline, you know, we need to distribute those soil sample points between the mid-row area and the undervine area. And we've done, now we have this map. We did that with Horticulture Innovation Australia. So there's like our methodology in Australia that works for all permanent alley crops. When this, you'll hear all this buzz about soil carbon. There's stuff going on behind the scenes to actually help that to be practically now useful for us as industries. And that will help us get to that performing point. What's gonna drive us to performing? Like, I genuinely see sustainability. Like, what's making us change as growers in McLaren Vale? As soon as we've become certified under the Sustainable Wine Grape Growing Australia scheme, that actually makes you realize how, in our instance, not good we are at digital record keeping, that we need to actually produce in three years' time to be re-certified. And we need that in order to keep our treasury contract. So this whole thing is pushing us to start using digital tech. We've just started to use OnSide, which is something that allows us now to be compliant with our contractors, finding it super useful. So definitely worth checking out. Yeah, and lots of work being done on the mapping stage to now take that great start and take it forward so that we can provide maps as an industry that's useful for all of those things we need to do. And sorry for going over time, but that is me. Thank you very much. If you do have any questions for Ollie, you'd like to ask him, I mean, of course, he'll be around later on today. You can ask him later on as well, but any questions you might have for him now is the time to do it? Great, yeah, great context on the inside. From a startup perspective, just wondering about that shift from a point solution to a whole of ecosystem kind of solution, what do they need to make that shift? Is it these open source platforms and data, that kind of thing, or? Again, the things that we're seeing, this worth checking out, like leaf agriculture is the best we've seen there out there in the world so far. And it is actually hard to think about both things because it's been really challenging for most startups just to get their own products right, let alone think about how those products fit within the wider ecosystem. The things that we're now seeing starting to come through, actually think about the ecosystem and how they plug into it almost before they start building stuff. And it's what leaf has done, but it is really tough to balance both. Again, we want to do the same as platform, so we should be something that helps you to make sure you've covered all of your vineyard correctly when you're spraying it. We want to pass that data onto our spray record-keeping software in our industry, but we actually want to pass that information on, but the spray record-keeping platforms in the wine industry currently completely siloed. Don't let you push any data into them and it's like, it's tough, to be honest with you. But yeah, if you're a startup, just think about how you plug in from the outset. Any other questions for Ollie? You must explain it too well. Excellent, all right. You might not be able to catch up with Ollie later on.