 Well, welcome everybody today for our hydro terror webinar series. That's great to see so many of you attending today and we really appreciate your time. Today we're talking about improving agricultural productivity with technology. And we're very fortunate to have Scott McKinnon from DPI in New South Wales to tell us all about the latest and greatest available there and how they are helping to get industry to adopt this technology to ultimately help them. So let's get into it. So, firstly, in terms of who's speaking here it's myself talking right now Richard Campbell, managing director of hydro terror. And I will be assisting Scott. Scott McKinnon is program leader farms of the future for New South Wales Department of Primary Industries Agriculture. A little bit about our presenter today. So Scott has over 25 years of sales and marketing experience with a practical commercial agribusiness background and an applied technology focus. He's worked extensively in Australia, New Zealand, Asia Pacific and globally based in Switzerland. He's led several innovation projects, testing and evaluating technology, agronomic modeling applications on farm and as specialized in commercial business best practice. For the latter part of his career he has specialized in the ag tech space in senior management roles for local and international startups. Consulted to corporate agribusiness and lead producer focus technology initiatives. He is the program leader for the $48 million future ready regions farms of the future program with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industry. And today in this presentation we're going to hear really quite a bit of background about how New South Wales Department of Primary Industry is helping through these programs to get farming up to the next level of adoption of IOT. Just before we launch into Scott's presentation, a few things. One of the things we really like is your feedback and Scott is very keen to get questions, both about IOT but also about the program itself. So please feel free to ask questions to raise a question, click on the Q&A and type into that and at the end of this presentation I will read out those questions and Scott and myself will do our best to answer them. If we can't answer them today, we will get back to you so we keep a record of those questions. So please keep the questions coming. Why does Hydrotera run this webinar series? We like to share knowledge. We like to share the knowledge of both, you know, specialist monitoring technology, as well as to provide a platform for people such as Scott who have something to say to industry which we think is valuable to get out there. So we like to help with that. We also like to facilitate education. So we see this as a good way to train industry and certainly feel we're getting some good momentum around that. But lastly and most importantly, and this is where the Q&A comes into it, we like to understand the needs of the industry so we can help serve you better. So on to today's program we've covered the introduction and I'm about to hand over to Scott who's going to talk to us about improving agricultural productivity with technology where to start. So welcome Scott and I'll hand over to you. Thanks Richard. I just want to jump to the first slide. Richard has asked me to be involved in the webinar series today because in between my two farms of the future projects, I was setting up some climate resilient projects which Richard and the Malone Institute put an expression of interest in and he'll talk about that later. So we started out of it during our regular catch ups. We tended to drift up subject and talked about AgTech and AgTep adoption, building awareness quite often and what's happening in that field. And when I was giving him an overview of some of the activities, New South Wales DPI is involved in in that space. I don't know if I could share my insights into the programs I've been involved in but also in general some of the activities at New South Wales DPI is working on in the IoT space. So thanks Richard for that opportunity and hopefully I can generate some interest if you just skip to the next slide. This slides out what they call a technology readiness level. It's a standard sort of assessment of technology not just in AgTech but across the board from one at the research stage. We've got an idea and building a concept right through to fully commercialized application. The DPI in different divisions is working right across all nine of these levels. The three inside ones you see their farms of the future one and two and climate smart pilots is our activities being run by the climate branch under DPI agriculture which is what I'm part of. There's also some activities in the research station and the research station side. So I'm going to run through the climate smart and farms of the future components today. But it's also just important to be aware that we do have some fantastic facilities at New South Wales DPI in the global AgTech ecosystem called the gate which is an incubator program for getting Ag technology start-ups off the ground. It's been running for about three years now and has had some really successful people through the program. Sorry is that better? And there's also some activity around activating the DPI research stations with with law-aware for research and commercial operations as well. So there's another program around that. So if we jump on to the next slide please Richard. The climate smart pilots is a group of programs and activities under the climate change research strategy which the DPI climate branch has multiple programs and streams running. Climate smart pilots is in two sections and the first section was really around building an open open sensor network and that was backed off some previous work we did in the farm decision tech space. The very early days of of Laura Wann and Laura Wann connectivity. And it's focused at building open networks in agricultural areas and then working with producers to get them on board with that technology. Skip to the next slide please. So those programs are in four different sectors at this point in time. So there's a very large fisheries oyster monitoring program down in Bateman's Bay. Narrow gated cropping research program in lateral move out at Trangay. Archka livestock IOT work at Tullamore looking at various parts of measuring and what we can measure to help producers be more resilient and more adaptable to climate. And then around Orange a horticultural orchard program as well. If you want more information on these particular pilots that's available on the New South Wales DPI climate web page and also on the farm decision tech web page which you can get to through there. And some of this data is accessible to the public and results are accessible on that side as well. Thanks Richard. So the second part of the climate smart pilots is really around demonstrating adaptation. And this is where I came into contact with with Richard. That's what we are really looking at in this perspective is not technology focused. It's linked to the to the same program but it's really around looking at activities which are producers are already doing themselves on properties to manage climate challenges. And to build resilience and then where possible fund those to expand them or to build more capability on top of those and then really bring that out into the market by building case studies and running field days around those situations. So we've got four programs which are just kicking off now under that program. One's out at Cobar it's around land management and trying to get better moisture infiltration in that particular area. We're looking at one in in young around precision agriculture and having a very high resolution precision agriculture so that we can have more timely management of climatic change conditions. Building on the farm farming forecaster program with mario farmer systems in the south and building some technology around about pasture management in drought conditions. And then one which Richard will say a few words about later is where hydroterror are working with Maloone Institute and the DPI around some regeneration modeling and hopefully building a tool that we can bring out to market to show people where those activities can be successful. Thanks Richard. I think everyone's aware that previously there's been a lot of adoption challenges with IOT in agriculture and the first one is really having the right connectivity. A lot of the work I've been working on in the pilot program and the expander program now with Farms of the Future is around connectivity but also around the devices on farm. But it can be seen here in this adoption curve that agriculture is a long way behind a lot of other industry sectors. And I think that's really at a point now it's changing. There's a lot more capability in the market. There's a lot more technology available. However there's still some challenges which we're hoping to address with some of the programs which we're running. Building on that user experience. Building some more information around that value proposition and I know there's a lot of other industry bodies looking at this as well. And then building on that interoperability factor so that technology that producers do select can be used into the future and can link into previous and new technologies coming along. Thanks Richard. So in 2019 the DPI was given some funding by the New South Wales State Government to do some field work to build information and evaluation going into a business case under the Snowy Hydro Legacy Fund. They're looking at how the New South Wales Government can provide better connectivity in regional areas and specifically in this project they're looking at farm and water environment and connectivity at a paddock level. A business case is being put together by external consultants for the government to look at ways that they could engage in the market and support that. And there was some questions around grower awareness and capability and how that could be built. So we set up three demonstration farms. One at Canambal, one at Narrow Mine and one at Blowney. They were set up with commercially available products only so it wasn't research or development. It was how can we enable existing technology and build on that. And we were really looking at the grower experience on installing and using that technology, looking to identify any potential gaps if we wanted to facilitate scale in this particular market. We looked across multiple sectors in three different geographies and installed comparable commercially available products on those properties. The concept at the time was that we were going to run a series of field days, bring in producers, build some training and awareness, get them out in the paddock, look at the technology, talk to the producers that we were working with, have access to talk to the suppliers. However, we all know what happened in 2019. So field days were really off the table for us. We had a really short deadline to be able to provide some evaluation into that program so we had to switch our path and we then looked at doing that in an online environment. So we did a lot of electronic work, produced some really nice video content of the producers for case studies which people could view. We built some virtual farms with a bit of augmented reality technology which was nice to work with, not as good as being on farm and looking and talking to the producer, but people could actually zoom around the properties and have a look at some of the technology. And then we ran a series of webinars. So to try and recreate the field day event, we had three webinars a week apart. First one, Introducing Ag Tech. The second one, running through the farmer case studies and having those collaborators actually speak as well as watching the videos. And the third one was really having the suppliers speak about their experience in the program. I'm going to slip to the next one, thanks Richard. So out of that program, we developed a user experience review. So we had a consultant work with the collaborators and interview them and look for their experience with getting the hardware set up, installed some of the challenges, some of the successes and then actually what they were using and what they weren't using out of that technology to feed back into the business case. We had three really good operational pilot sites which would have been fantastic to run some field days but we didn't get to that. We have the webinar series and the web resources are all on the on the climate web page. So anyone's interested, you can go and look at those tools. They're still live. Also started to build an Ag Tech industry and grow a database. Obviously key part of the pilot program was survey and evaluation which was fed back into the business case as well. And then we worked with Tocale Ag College and Darren Price who is one of our consultants on the program. And we've put together an Ag Guide which is under the Tocale Ag Guide program called an introduction to Ag Tech. That's currently a print at the moment and will be launching sometime in November and that'll be available from Tocale. That's a really practical guide written by Darren around identifying your pain points, understanding some of the technology, understanding some of the challenges and successes around Ag Tech but then also linking that into our three case studies. So we've got some really good practical examples in there and some feedback from the actual producers. So there are a few things which I learnt from this two year program and installing and setting up Ag Tech. And one of those is when you're talking about anything with radio frequencies is towers. So we seem to have to find high spots and put up towers or put antennas on existing towers. And that varied from, you can see some of the images here from the top of windmills to the top of silos to one of our collaborators sourcing a secondhand TV antenna off one of their neighbours. And along with being remote and having towers is actually getting power to places. Some of the considerations are what's your landscape look like? What are your power resources and what are the power requirements of some of those devices and networks that we'll be setting up? I'm going to jump to the next one. And the second really strong insight was landscape which I just put under the term trees and hills. Being flat isn't necessarily a good thing. We have some challenges in some of the flat country with just simply trying to get radio signals and connectivity through trees. And as you can see in the map there of our site at Blaney it was extremely hilly terrain and we had to put in multiple gateways to get covery and in some spots we couldn't. So we went to satellite or things like rain gauges in more remote parts of the property. So looking at that sort of multiple connectivity options was something that we had to do on most of the situations to get the right information from the different landscapes. So what were our successes? All the producers were really happy with water monitoring. We had various types of water monitoring from tanks troughs to pipe flows to even you see the photo there putting sensors on the creek so they could tell when the creek was either flooding or was dry. Saved on travel time, saved on getting to remote places at strange time middle of the night going down to check pumps and things like that and could help with maintenance time so identifying issues early. The second one was surveillance. Cameras for livestock surveillance and for security. All the producers were really happy with surveillance getting cameras out there but as we know cameras will acquire bandwidth so we did need to put in Wi-Fi in some of those situations or have really good 4G connectivity but being able to monitor things without having to leave where you're working whether it's the office or the home or being able to dial them up on your phone when your mobile was really beneficial. And the third one on two of the sites we had in Paddock Waying which both of those producers were really happy with just being able to see the progress of a mob of cattle and how it's going without having to guess, without having to get them in the yards and weigh them just made there was better time management for when they were getting those cattle in for various different purposes. Some of the challenges we found as I mentioned before was working with radio installation, trees, topography, antennas not insurmountable but just something that needs to be considered and then the other challenge was animal damage. I think we incurred every type of animal damage possible from birds covering solar panels to hares and wallabies chewing cables and cattle being able to somehow get through cattle guards and still rip antennas off with their tongues. They're very inquisitive so just some considerations there with installations for sure is what are the challenges around animals. Thanks Richard. So now I'd like to move on to Farms of the Future. So we were very fortunate in the fact with our pilot program and the information that we did provide into the proposal along with a lot of industry consultations that the consultants did that was announced in June in the budget that they'd allocated $48 million to Farms of the Future for a major expansion over four years. New South Wales DPI was identified as a lead agency on that so we're just starting to kick off that program at the moment. It's a really great opportunity to build capability in the region, lift knowledge and awareness around AgTech and actually get some AgTech out on farm. This program will be run in 11 LGA's across those sort of five main aggregated areas and cover multiple agricultural sectors so focused on red meat sector, grains, cotton and horticulture. There's going to be a really fantastic opportunity not only in those LGA's but across the state to build capability and awareness and knowledge at a producer level but also through the advisor network and just across the whole industry. So there's a large focus on building that capability and awareness. I'm going to jump to the next one please Richard. So the program is mapped out across multiple streams. The first stream at the moment which is where we are as we're talking today is really that program initiations stream so setting up the project team, building all the ways of working. We're already scoping the five potential sites in those LGA's in those particular locations where planning to set up information hubs with demo sites. At this point in time they'll be on New South Wales DPI research stations so we can get really good access for producers and to be able to run workshops, potentially field days, demos and potentially even have some drop in times where people can just come in and look at the tech and talk to a development officer there who can answer some of their questions and help them through the journey. One of the key things I mentioned before on the back of our ad guide is we're going to build an education and awareness program. So we're working with Tocale at the moment on designing both a workshop format plus an online format. So really bringing the concepts in the book alive but building that tool so that it can be used by not only us in this program but can be picked up by industry and others to be used as well. So alongside of that program that will be part of the producer eligibility going forward in those LGA's so the idea is that we can work directly in groups or potentially online with producers that are wanting to get into this space and they'll run through that program and come out with a device plan. We're really looking at taking them through that process of defining what they need or what's possibly some of the best options for them in AgTech and connectivity options for their particular situation. So we found in the pilot even though there were some similarities across just our three farms that we were using every situation was specific and different and different technologies worked better in different situations. That's a really a personalized program to go through. In those particular LGA's there's some really good existing LauraWan networks but we'll be building on the back of that and filling in some of the black spots in those networks and providing access to existing LauraWan networks for producers in those areas and then we are going to launch in 2023 into a grants program so we'll be looking at working with the producers which are eligible in those LGA's which have been through the program to provide assistance to get on board with AgTech. That program will have two rounds in 2023 and 2024 sorry and it won't be limited to LauraWan technology that will be open technology and include other forms of localised farm connectivity so producers have that as in the... Thanks Richard. That's pretty much the wrap up of the current program. It is very early days. We're just in the process of setting up our team. A lot of those streams of work have already commenced to some degree and really at this point in time we're getting out there and engaging with stakeholders whether it's suppliers, vendors or industry bodies to make sure that we can build the right partnerships to make it successful. Well thanks Scott. That was great and I guess in terms of a bit of a summary of what I think were the key takeouts of this is that agriculture is lagging behind other sectors and there are reasons for that. In my opinion having sort of dealt quite a lot in this area. If we cast our minds back about sort of six years ago in Victoria we had a lot of money spent. I think it was originally associated with the sale of Telstra to automate a whole lot of water reticulation but there wasn't the underlying sort of service network to maintain it. So in the end there was a bit of a disconnect there. So it's sort of important to give the whole business ecosystem around it. So lots of money went in but without the support network around it in the end the farmers didn't really embrace that adoption and that was the early days of I guess automation around mobile phones and using those cellular networks to control things. So some learnings around that and I think we've come a long way and it's tremendous to see that support around getting connectivity happening now. But Ag is lagging and but what's really exciting in my opinion is the potential is just starting to be realised around combining not only IoT and sort of what Scott's focused on a fair bit today but also more of the satellite analysis tools that can be combined with that to produce predictive tools. So when you combine the Bureau of Met data with your on-ground sensing data and those sorts of things you can really start to have foresighting in how to manage your properties better. So it's very, very powerful and there is a huge number of players coming into this area. The second thing is the value proposition piece. I think this is a really good point. Do you really need something remote to measure how much water you've got in a trough or how much water is remaining in a dam or how well your articulation is working? Well, the answer to that is is very farm specific. And I think what we heard in Scott's program is that it is farm specific but they're going to offer a service here for people who want to take it up to actually look at. Hello Richard. I think we've lost Richard Marcio. Yeah, Scott is just talking about the kids. Yeah, would be great. I think building on Richard's comment where he started talking around the value proposition and the return on investment. I think there's still a long way to go to make that easier to understand. It's a challenge that I think everyone's trying to address. And I'm sure the market is trying to do that as well. And I know some industry bodies looking at trying to address that as well. We had some really good verbals from our producers around different benefits they got and quite often it's just a piece of mind to know that something's functioning and you don't have to worry and go and check it. But obviously with things like water monitoring, it's not that difficult for producers to do their own calculations of how many times they go and check a particular trough tank or irrigation site, how long it takes them, how much they travel, what's the wear and tear. I think those sort of ROI's are pretty good to do on the back of an envelope yourself. But then again it's some of the more complex decision making which I think is harder to get a handle on. But that's part of our expanded program is definitely looking at case studies in some of those producers which come on the program and where we can build out some really more granular ROI around that. I think some of the other points Richard had there, we mentioned water monitoring, irrigation optimisation is probably very similar. Cameras was really interesting. Having access to live footage or even just recorded footage, all of our collaborators really put high up the list. It's probably one of the most expensive and resource dependent parts especially when you're looking at pushing live video all around your property. But some of the benefits that our collaborators saw, one of our cattle producers had a very large hand tilt zoom camera. So basically a camera on top of his shed that you can remote control from your office or your phone. And when he had his heifers in the yard carving he could actually just have a quick look without having to drive up to the cattle yards every half an hour or an hour and just give him peace of mind that they're okay, they weren't down, that they were still walking around. The same with one of our other producers which had a set of sheep yards a long way away from their house and when they had sheep there overnight or during the day they could simply just dial in and have a look and make sure that everything was going okay. And then when you look at security, especially with the still cameras which were taking time lapse photography our producers could actually come in and look at images from their sheds or around their farm overnight just to make sure that everything was okay and there hadn't been any security issues. So I think there's some really solid benefits in those areas but it also is probably a challenge to get set up correctly. The in paddock weighing was really interesting it was pretty new technology when we brought it on board has been getting a lot of media coverage but we're planning to get one unit and move it around the three properties but we took it to our first collaborator and essentially they wouldn't let it go so we had to go and source another unit for the second property and I believe both of those collaborators have kept those units after that program finished and just I think it's the same thing just knowing what's happening remotely being able to see those aggregated weights go up or level out or just to be able to monitor that I mean one of the stories our producers told us was they had a remote property which was several kilometers walk to the neighbour's cattle yard so they could weigh the cattle so simply by understanding what the mob weight averages were doing they could actually time better getting those cattle in to actually weigh them properly historically they said they were either three weeks too early or two weeks late to get to the weights they wanted whereas now they could get a better handle on what's happening with the mob without actually having to go and handle them and move them and weigh them properly. I'm not sure whether they've got Richard back on have we Richard? Yeah Scott I think we don't have Richard still back so maybe we can move to the questions and answers and then yeah I think you are able to yeah sure thank you. Yeah there's a message here from Luke around have we only considered Laura Wain for low bandwidth monitoring. No Laura Wain is just one of the backgrounds looking at leveraging existing networks wherever possible whether that's a 4G network or NBIOT or LTMs and now with satellite as well so once we do get to the actual device side of things will be connectivity agnostic as long as it fits with the producers needs and as I mentioned before also looking at on-farm Wi-Fi one for the benefits of being able to add security cameras but also for Wi-Fi calling in part to the property where you don't get normal 3, 4G signal so that's really important to have that connectivity especially in remote places. I'm back Scott sorry about that. Zoom kicked me out. Excellent work did you talk about the Malone Institute as well. You can do that before I jump on to the next question. Okay if you want to show your screen again. Okay sorry about that everybody I'll just take you back to a photo early in the presentation which this photo on the bottom right is a portion of catchment that the Malone Institute manages so I think this particular project might be a bit of a vision for the future well I'm pretty sure it is vision for the future in quite a few applications. So the project is about rehydrating landscapes and Hydrochera was engaged to monitor the effectiveness of doing this so this is the Malone Creek in the picture here and it's about how we can adapt the landscape to be more drought resilient by holding more water in the landscape so the flood plains which stretch out across various portions of the catchment provide a target for rehydration and by putting in leaky weir structures of which one you can see in that photo you can retain water in there to increase recharge of those flood plain areas and therefore you have more water storage in your aquifers and in your soil moisture storage to handle the ups and downs of rainfall and climate extremes so our challenge was to monitor that to check on its effectiveness and that project has been really good at really seeing the value of both real-time monitoring data measured both through the surface water bodies that you're seeing there so whether it's levels of water in those stream reaches or flow or whether it's the real-time soil moisture within the flood plains that's been combined with satellite data to provide ways of scaling that data because it's always difficult to scale from just a sensor point up to a hole of catchment and you need tools or a layer to do both so sensors are great at looking at dynamics of systems and satellite data is great at looking at the spatial context of that as well as providing us with insights of how that changes with time so this is a project which got federal funding about four million dollars to really look at those processes the learnings and where this project's heading is there's some real opportunity for farmers to be looking at ancillary benefits like carbon and carbon credits and biodiversity credits so part of this project is looking at how to quantify those and ultimately how to link them to actual financial mechanisms to sell those credits so it's been an interesting project and it's required the use of the cellular telemetry networks it's got a network of oh goodness I've forgotten the numbers about 45 odd soil moisture capacitance probes and all hooked up to telemetry and a network of about 100 ground water piezometers to allow us to quantify the soil moisture storage and the soil moisture storage it's also got two climate stations also to limited which help us to really understand the overall water balance of the site this is really to prove up whether or not rehydration is working what will be very interesting and the real power out of this will be combining it with that satellite that can predict and quantify biodiversity changes, soil health changes and that sort of thing and develop the methods that can be used as indicators of those credits that I spoke about so it's a really great project to be involved in and many things to Scott and their program and this project really which is to look at where does catchment rehydration make most sense to do and that is about doing a spatial analysis using a range of different data sets to look at where do we get best return on investment from undertaking rehydration activities because it doesn't make sense to do it everywhere so I've just commenced that project DPI has just announced their project manager for the job and out of that exercise we will be developing a heat map to of the state of New South Wales with where that process can be optimised and where we can see lots of re-vegetation and better farm performance and better resilience to drought so that's probably it around the Maloon Institute and many thanks to Scott for funding that one so we might go back to the Q&A questions so the next question is from Senail Hasnain I hope I've pronounced that correctly how do you see pilots in relation to groundwater monitoring we didn't have any specifically focused on that however at all three of our collaborating farms we did have ball level sensors in so that was essentially monitoring groundwater level on that particular property one of those was an irrigation bore and a vineyard one was a stock bore in a grazing enterprise and the other was an old stock bore which was very close by a large irrigation bore so looking at almost the secondary levels in effect of that bore so that was really at the producer level and that was information that they were interested in and it was essentially a water tank pressure sensor with an extremely long cable on it which went down the bore and they could monitor that those bore heights in terms of so thanks for that Scott so Wayne Evans were you using the Laura Wann network for any control activities e.g pump start and mostly monitoring yeah thanks in our particular sites was only monitoring so it was only one way Laura Wann how I know that the climate smart guys in their horticulture program which I mentioned earlier have been doing two way control monitoring with Laura Wann so I know that they were setting that up over the last six or eight months or so but I'm not over that project so can't give you an update but not in ours but in others yes okay and have you found it reliable using Laura Wann for control I wasn't part of it so I haven't done it myself haven't been involved in it alright next question from Roger Barrett are drones used in any of the pilots e.g what are they used in the winery industry our pilots were specifically focused on devices needing connectivity back all and generally at this point in time drones are run by someone in the paddock so we didn't use them in our pilot we did use them for some of our augmented reality imagery and for our videos which was really good but we didn't use them in an agricultural sense okay are you seeing a lot more adoption of drones so like across the industry I think a lot more practical use of them just from my personal observations in the market there was a run on them a few years ago and everyone got excited and there was a lot purchased but I've seen desks and in boxes in the corner but I think now there's a lot more beneficial applications coming out I think there's a lot more commercial use of drones it would be hard to comment on the producer use of drones but there's some really good commercial operators out there providing some excellent diagnostic tools based on imagery now as a package so they'll come out and have a crop you've got and then are partnered with data analytics platforms which can provide decision support insights so do you see your program extending to those sorts of technologies as well not in this particular round of pilots we're focused on connectivity and enabling that connectivity and then the devices that go with that connectivity I think some of the information that will come from our program can be obviously leveraged with that drone imagery and other imagery to make better decisions so really what we're providing is just one piece of the puzzle as we know AgTech is much bigger than just IoT and connectivity especially when you look at imagery or remote imagery and then a lot of the information that's getting off machines today is pretty vast yeah that's right I'm not sure that people always use it right so sometimes there's more information than they can keep up with in terms of Laura Wann versus satellite telemetry and you know this emergence of the micro satellite networks that sort of thing where do you see that heading you know in terms of being adopted on farms do you think Laura Wann is going to be the most applicable for farmers or do you think there's a place for those micro satellite networks in the farming space we found it was down to the individual situation which is part of what we want to build into our training and awareness program is that you really need to go through that process and evaluate it depends on a whole lot of factors depends on your geography, depends on the number of devices depends on your size and connectivity it really comes down to determining what you do and doing the numbers and that could be a combination of both which is what we had at our Blaney site where we had really good Laura Wann coverage across the vineyard, bits of the grazing enterprise but then there were places where all we wanted was a rain gauge so there's no point putting up a Laura Wann gateway for one rain gauge so we used satellite rain gauges. So do you think I've got a couple more questions here I should ask but do you see the Laura Wann coverage extending statewide eventually or do you think it's going to be clustered? I think it's going to be clustered just by the nature of the radio frequencies and how it works. As I said it's a bit like the rain gauge concept there's no point installing a gateway for two devices when you can get that information probably by another mechanism whether it's LTEM that sort of low bandwidth 4G type technologies or satellite or others so yeah a comment here from Julian Smith just a comment that drones are being used more often by consultant agronomists for in-crop management decisions do you have a view on that comment Scott? I'd agree with it yep that's good to hear it's the ROI of your time really I know a lot of me using them in large broad-acre scenarios to do scouting so they can actually scout in the middle of paddocks rather than drive around the outside so it's a really ROI on time and that skill as well. Next question another question from Wayne Evans was there any specific information that came through from the pilots in relation to the improvement of farm performance e.g. 10% reduction in water use or X% productivity improvement? We didn't go to that level of evaluation we were really looking at the grower experience and level of understanding of the technology we didn't really get into those economic evaluations I think if you dig around you can probably find some stats on that there were some very high level ones in the precision to decision work done in I think 2017 so we didn't provide that information out of our evaluation it's certainly it's one of the bigger challenges so we're working on that we're working on a loan project to look at what are the methods to measure productivity and what are the key metrics that can be used and readily measured I think it's a big part of the puzzle isn't it if you get those models right I know packages like Maya Grazing and that sort of thing start to head down that path I think it is a big thing that Wayne has raised there that if you can really get your metrics to align with you what you need to know about your productivity then there will be a lot more adoption of that technology I think the best documented example would be using soil moisture probes in irrigation which is neutron probes have been used since the 80s and there's some really good stats around water use efficiency and irrigation management and getting your timing right through just using that one device now with modern technology and connectivity they're probably not as accurate as a neutron probe but some of the probes now you can have them one in each of your fields and get that information a couple of times a day and get that timeliness I think now Yeah it's certainly a bit easier with the water sort of things to get the value proposition because you can measure everything pretty accurately and we're seeing that with some of these irrigation tools like Swan Systems where people are quite happy to pay quite a bit of money per pivot because they know they're getting that saving so it's definitely moving that way and we don't have any more open questions at the moment but there are a few questions in the chat I'll see if I can get those open I think all of those have been dealt with Q&A two more maybe check the questions at the top too sounds like I might have missed a couple at the beginning no I think that's all the questions so Scott many thanks for presenting today it's been great to oh Giuseppe's saying I've missed his question where is your question Giuseppe oh there's a couple more that have popped up sorry what's the best way to reach out to Scott with new technology that might be useful to the industry that's from Teal Watkins if you just go the New South Wales NSW DPI climate google that and go to the Farms of the Future page the details should be there there's also a web form at bottom where you can register interest so just fill that in and type your comments down the bottom there's actually a free text part at the bottom of that or contact Richard good answer there Scott in terms of there's a question from Roger Burrett is the electricity cost increased by much with adoption of these technologies I would say no especially Laura Wain it's low power so essentially your device is in the paddock run off a battery for several years or a very small solar panel remote power was something which was got to be part of your thinking if you don't have normal power but not with most of it and probably I suppose electricity might be one of your efficiencies if you're talking about irrigation pumps and running them but a lot of the field devices are low power devices yeah so typically solar power or just battery so I'd say you're going to save on power because you'll be optimising your pumping I think it does have these questions right at the top I don't know how to get right up to the top is it just a financial decision or also a new understood model to use to manage farms being more efficient what's the current education level in this industry in terms of people and users to be able to adopt this well if I can tackle the last one first it's very low at the moment which is part of the focus on education and awareness in our program there are some stats around that in the precision to decision work they did on AgTech adoption and it's been identified that that's one of the gaps as an industry we want to address to build that level our first step to do that is running this program and running the Ag Guide it's a plain language guide to some high tech type of solutions so I think just building the confidence understanding some of the language is a challenge and the first part of it I can only give the response to basically our collaborators and it really depends on the benefits they get so as I mentioned with the technology that we put out anything to do with managing water they thought was great waters are an expensive and important resource whether it's livestock or cropping so managing that better for productivity or animal welfare measures is really important and then just knowing what's happening around your property a lot of producers are trying to juggle a lot of balls at once and being able to be confident that one part of their operation is going well and they don't have to spend a lot of time looking at it they can divert time to to another more important part of their business at that point in time so they're really about route time and peace of mind and making better decisions Okay we've got an anonymous question for an anonymous attendee asking that question what are your recommendations for water monitoring abroad? Yeah it depends depends what you're monitoring whether it's tanks, troughs, river flow, pipe flows, irrigation flows so really you need to go back to look at what you want to monitor in your water situation and then look at the different technologies available but there's no one solution I would recommend at all you have to look at each individual situation Okay so maybe finally the question is you're going to be running these or setting up these networks and then you're looking for farmers who may want to participate how do they sort of keep in touch to know when the gates will be open to be able to apply and go through that process with yourself? Well we'll be running some pretty intensive communications campaigns early next year so a bit of a watch this space but probably for if they want to just do their own updates just check that DPI NSW climate web page on Farms of the Future or just google New South Wales DPI Farms of the Future and go there that's where we're going to be posting the latest information but in those actual target LGA's we'll be working with local stakeholders in those areas to make sure we get the latest information out very good. Well Scott thanks very much for today I think our questions have been exhausted and our time is up but it was great and it's a great initiative too obviously to drive this so many thanks for your time today it's been great Great thanks Richard I appreciate the opportunity to give you an update of all the different streams of activity that DPI is doing in that ag tech space and thanks everyone for coming along too we really appreciate you being here. Thanks very much