 Thank you for giving me an opportunity to speak to you. I'm the regional manager of the Asia Pacific region for CENTEC. CENTEC is a worldwide company. We have also companies in America and Europe. I want to do two things. I want to talk about how too much love can affect crop resilience and then just towards the end, just towards the end of the session, I'd also like to consider some of the questions that the convener has posed on just a bit about company and that. So we started out in 1991, and CENTEC, just to clear it up, builds one thing. It builds soil moisture sensors. This is one of them. I have sensors that go to 40 metres that don't look like this. This sensor has... Sorry, this probe has a sensor every 10 centimetres. It can read moisture and temperature, or it can read moisture, temperature and salinity. It broadcasts out a signal that's about this wide around the probe. So to be successful, you have to make this probe able to represent with its area... this area represent a paddock that's... or an orchard that's many hectares. So there's other things apart from just sensing that you have to consider. So let's roll back. This is Peter Buster, the founder. In 1991, probably in an onion field or something like that, around Murray Bridge. And what was his motivation? In 1991, you could not get a continuous record of volumetric soil moisture. You could get continuous record logged of gypsum blocks, or you could get discontinuous record by using a neutron moisture meter where you gathered data when you visited the site. What was happening in the background there was we were moving from a system back in the 50s and 60s in the Riverland where you had five deliveries a year and I think you had a six specialist where the river was flowing. You then moved to Water Joes where you ordered water, surface flow. They came along and pulled the gates. So very slow stuff. You might only be seeing eight or nine irrigations a year. We were starting to move towards the opportunity to have two irrigations a day, to pulse irrigations. And just going out there and measuring once a week wasn't going to cut it and there was nothing out there. The other reason, the other word I used was volumetric water content. When an irrigator makes a decision, they make a decision about the volume on it. They don't make a decision about the tension in the soil. There's no valve you can turn that responds to tension. You turn a valve that responds to volume. And so when you measure volumetric water content for soil, and if I have soil that's 100 centimetres I say, that's 30%. That means that if I squeezed all of the moisture out of that 100 millimetre column, I'd have a column that's 30 millimetres. And if my sensor says that's gone down by 15 millimetres, then to restore it, you have to make a decision about the volume we're going to add to add 15 millimetres of water. And a millimetre of water per metre squared is a litre. That's that. Sorry. Sorry to pick it up on already. The other aspect of this was Peter was an agronomist. And so it was an agronomist driving engineering. I think, and I'm probably being a bit presate here, that the meeting was between Peter and someone who was in associated with the defence industry. At that stage Peter was trying to drive tensiometers on a mercury switch, I think, and they said, hey, there's a lot better things to be done. And so Peter moved on to that. So a bit about Sentech makes saw moisture probes, but to be successful in the market you have to help people know what site to put their saw moisture probe at. I mean, if this probe was a probe that sent seats and I was in the floor above here and I stuck it here, there'd be no seats in this room. And if I stuck it here, there'd be plenty of seats in the room. And it's trivial, but that's a really big thing you have to be willing to train your distributors to be able to have some key insights. The next thing you have to do is whenever you put a sensor anywhere the process of inserting that sensor can set up artefacts. So you have to support people in making a sense of placement that doesn't produce a whole lot of artefacts. Artefacts are signals that have nothing to do with what's happening in the environment. The next thing you have to do is be able to make it easy for people to get data. You have to pick some reliable telemetry or if they're going to log it, you have to pick an easy way to log it. And lastly, having values and buying a graphics package is not using pictures to create understanding. We have a guy that has been there 20 years. He's a software geek, if you will. He is driven by a gronomist into the type of pictures he makes. So we actually design our own graphic package. We don't fire things off the shelf. So finally, let's get on to what I wanted to talk about which was a bit about resilience and too much love. So for me, if I buy a piece of land that's got 60 centimetres of good topsoil my crop will have resilience. If I can get the roots exploring all that soil my crop will have resilience. If that soil has good cation exchange capacity and I can get my roots exploring that to grab their nutrition. So the two things I want to do to maintain crop resilience is manage irrigation so that I maximise the amount of soil that my plant can explore. And that's where now if Valentine's is over we can talk about how too much love is not always a good thing. So next I'll just go on to show you a quick video if it works of how we install these probes. We have quite a few other probes with different installation techniques. So let's see if she's going to play. Try again. Yes. So this is some of the equipment we've built and designed. We screw in effectively a guide about a foot deep in the soil and this is so we can get a very accurate hole because if you just go at the soil without any guide we're not going to get an accurate hole. That auger is tapered and what we're looking for is an interference fit. For those of you who might have a drill press on a bench you'll notice you can get your chuck out on a morse taper. Well this is the inversion of that. We're making a tapered hole and then we drop the probe in. So the taper gives a very good fit in clays with a 120 centimetre probe you're going to need a high lift jack to bring it back out and we've got the tools to help you do that. I don't know where the sound went but whatever. So I'm just going to talk about, I think it was last year we did some work with a very large seed producer. This seed producer took us to a few of their key farms and we did some monitoring and I'll talk about just a couple of the farms. So the first one was Broccoli in California. What you'll notice here is which way is this going to work? Not much of a thing. That's the telemetry and the power. There's a cable going down there. There's a drill and drop in there. It's on-bed strip irrigated and this is the sort of software we use. So what are we seeing here? We're seeing obviously time across the bottom and what we're seeing up the top is a bit disingenuous unless you're used to it. You'll notice that we don't have a y-axis and if you look at the numbers on the left-hand side you'll see that 1.2 can be above 1.7 and 1.8 can be also above 1.3. What we've done is we've shifted the y-axis so that when someone who uses this is looking at it they're always seeing the top sensor at the top and they're seeing the bottom sensor at the bottom and we have a background program that keeps those lines separate. What you'll see with the top sensor is I've also got labels there. You can see root activity when you're looking at volume because when a plant is taking water it starts as the sun comes up and it stops as the sun goes down whereas if the water is changing because it's just draining it goes on day and night. So one of the key features of root activity is the stepping. The other thing you see is that early on we have poor root activity and I might go into explain this now. This... I'll forget this pointer. This we call the MESA pattern. The glass is full. What that means is we've put so much water on there that we're waterlogged. What happens when you waterlog a soil is that plant roots need oxygen and you create conditions called anaerobic. It stops nutrient uptake. It actually causes a hormone to be sent up to the leaves believe it or not, slow down water use and just to divert a bit you see this as a real classic when you go and look at cotton on rice soils in the MIA because a good rice soil you don't want any leakage and the crazy thing is you're looking at water use and every time the guy irrigates water use slows down for two or three days until he drains out the top 30 centimetres and it starts to pick up again. It's counter-intuitive but that's the effect of too much love in this case. So this is absolutely saturated. These rises up here are also indicating saturation. So we've got a situation where the guys irrigating fairly frequently and we've got to talk him into cutting back and as he cuts back, the type of things you start to see is you start to see the stepping going deeper and deeper. So in other words, by actually cutting back on the amount of water he's allowing his plant to develop the full potential of root zone and this is not an uncommon observation. I'm just going to move now to the other slide to sum that up. How do you take that sort of information on an individual level this is the graph we've just been looking at and turn it into something that people can manage easy. So what we do here is we put a line in that says above here you're saturated. In other words, you're putting on too much water. When the water content, that's the water content of these six sensors added together is up above there. It means the aeration is compromised. It also can lead to things like denitrification and other things, they're not a major concern. So by getting the, this pointer is desperate, getting the grower to pull back, we move them into the green area. What you're not seeing here and you will see on another side as we move to another crop is down the bottom of the green area we have a red area and that's stressed and we can tell stressed not by measuring the tension but we can look at the daily water use and as you start to see your daily water use decline but taking into account the variation in weather you can use that to set your lower limit and so the farmer is looking at one graph and he's trying to keep it in the green. The other way to divert and we see this is we hit that graph on the side and we can say how many days were you in the green, how many days were you in the red and how many days were you in the blue and that green to total ratio is a measure of how good you are managing your irrigation and for instance when we sell into the Egypt market the guys run over these probes because they don't like being monitored. We sell more probes. So let's move on to tomatoes in Italy. This is a much better example and this is your red line here for stress. We also put a line in here that is to indicate you're going to need to water in the next day or so. What have I got there? And these lines can also be displayed in other ways so people can receive alerts if they want to. We can generate agronomic alerts. This is what I'm talking about. You're either too full or you're heading towards stress or you're actually in stress. And this is one of the things about data requirements for these probes. We can generate alerts about sensor condition, alerts about battery condition, alerts about failure to have a expected transmission. But I won't cover those today. So here we've got, again, we're cutting back slightly and we're starting to see these really good indications of root activity. Let's move on to an even better example. This is onions in Texas and, again, we've got this graph up the top. This is our top sensor, this bottom sensor. One of the things to notice here is added irrigation and fertilizer and you can see when he's watered that's gone up and drained to bring that up and drained to bring that up a little bit there but nothing much here. What does that mean? That means he's kept his fertilizer in the top 40 centimetres. If I'd seen a big blip in these, that means he's washed all his fertilizer out of the top 40 centimetres. You'll also see that in this graph we've run down until the point where we're going into harvest, so dry off. So, okay, I'm going well. So now I'll go back to just address some of the questions that the conveners wanted me to look at. Uptake. You really need to identify the benefits to those in your pathway to market. We have a lot of different pathways to market. Some of them are agronomists. Some of them are big dealers. Some of them are researchers. We also have pathways into the mining market, pathways into a landscape market. They're very different pathways. Tomorrow I fly up to work on a race field, a big racetrack up out of Brisbane. So we have, I suppose, what you've got to do is you may have identified the benefits to farmers, but you're not going to, well, we're a wholesaler. We manufacture this stuff. We don't sell to farmers. We sell to people who sell to farmers. So you've got to identify a benefit to them. And the type of benefit that you're going to have to identify is obviously you're going to have to identify a good profit margin. You're going to have to identify a name that spells out that these have been here for a long while. I'll go to country shows and I'll get people coming up and being really very aggravated at me. And we unpack it and they've bought a Ford and I'm the Holden dealer. There's a lot of companies that come and go out there in the tech space and they last a few years and they move on. To the farmer, every company was a probe company and hence he wanted to complain to me even though I didn't know anything about his, the brand he was having issues with. So adoption. So the journey from the backyard to 80 countries, one of the things about getting out into the world is you've got to look at all the ways that you can influence decision makers. Peter really emphasised building good relationships with USDA. And so National Ecological Observation Network is a very big client of us in the US. We find our entry into Asia is just through the research market. It's a lot harder to enter into the farm market where you've got language gaps and that. Our software is translated into Spanish, but obviously, well it's not obvious to you, but I can tell you we haven't got it in Mandarin yet. So when we enter these other markets we're offering entering them not with our full product. We're entering them looking for integrators. That is we just provide the sensor and then they hook it up to their own logging and their own telemetry. We provide installation tools. So you've got to support installers. I mentioned that earlier. We have a whole sort of little training about representative sites. It's getting easier these days because lots of people buy EM. So they have some idea of what the spatial variability of the soil is in the paddock. Lots of people are also buying NDVI. So they have some idea where a representative crop is. Because when you're aiming to represent a whole paddock, just by measuring that, you've got to put it in a site that's representative. We've got a support installation. And what I mean by this is a lot of this stuff used to be based on slurry install. The problem with slurry install is manifold, but one is preferential flow. And how much are you going to pay me to tell your water runs to the bottom of a hole? Because if you get preferential flow, that's where the water will run. You're not going to pay me anything. But if you set up a poor install, you're going to create an artifact. That is a pathway that didn't exist before. And that artifact is going to take a 5-mil rainfall and put it down at 60 centimetres. And you're going to think, wow, thank God my rain gauge lied. Things are really good. Well, they're not. You've just created an artifact. The other things are more subtle. And I had this happen with some colleagues overseas. You put in a slurry and you get to a full point. You go for a big drying regime and you can't get back up to the full point. And then we look at the rate that rainfall percolates through to that probe and we find that it took eight hours when that full point was there. And now it only takes four hours. So the whole medium has become more porous. So what we try to do is standard install if you're using the 2-inch tube, that's achievable to about 3 metres. Beyond 3 metres, we're stuck with slurry. So I've done up to 20 metre installs in sand and we've basically had to slurry the sand back in there. There's no other option. But for most ag uses, we're using this and you saw the tools that we use with it. I should say this probe is one of our new probes. The top bit there's a Bluetooth. So to enter a market where telemetry brings other costs, we've cut that out. The farmer can use their Apple Law Android phone to pick up the data here. That stores 2,000 readings and then they pick up the data and upload it when they get reception. So it can be used independent of reception. I should say also we can support satellite and we have been supporting satellite transmission around the world for some years now. But that adds another expense. The other thing is data accessibility and this is about reliable telemetry. We use quite an expensive protocol in the sense we demand send and receive, not send and forget. What send and receive means is if my pointer is somewhere on my ring memory here, I send out the data since the last point of date and I wait for my server in America to come back and say it's received it. Otherwise I go to sleep and then I wake up two times and then I go back to sleep for three hours if the upload is three hours, I wake up again. And why I say this is there's quite a bit of variation in signal strength across a day. And so the other thing is that telemetry is power hungry. Our sensors are not power hungry at all. So our biggest issue with supplying power is supplying power to the telemetry. And I should say it's getting better and better. I have people down the South East here. I think they were saying on 2G I could expect five kilometres on cat M1, which is the 4G standard. And now that will translate also to 5G for data. They're getting up to 90 kilometres. And so we are seeing, I was working with people up in the northwest of Western Australia. We're slowly seeing them take out the satellite and put in the modem. Satellite data is very expensive. The actual modem itself is not that much more. How am I going? Have I done 20 minutes? Yeah. Okay. Hold on. Sorry. So we support data interpretation. That is agronomist designs graphics packages. And we establish protocols within our company so we can take feedback from our distributors and put it into engineering. We all live in one spot. Well, we don't anymore. We now live in America and Europe. But we have systems that are worldwide and we take that through. And that's incredibly important. Your sales team is your development team. Because they're going to tell you all the things you missed when you just did it in a paddock. And there are endless things that can be missed that can ruin you, well, not ruin you, but can make it very difficult to sell into some markets. Why don't I call it quits and do questions?