 We thought we'd think about ag tech and what technologies are in there and how they might apply to some other areas and the obvious one that's all on our doorsteps for the most unfortunate reasons is in emergency recovery with the fires that we've had, not just in Kangaroo Island but particularly there. So we thought we'd have a little discussion and ask your inputs for that or indeed other applications because there are a lot of applications of the ag tech technologies across some of them come from the space area for example and crossing over into the health and medical area. So really open in any area but we'll focus particularly on emergency recovery. So our first panel member if I could welcome him to the stage is Jason Chaffee, CEO of Agassins and E. Sheppard with the virtual fencing and those of you who were there today, it was a very interesting presentation. Jason is originally from rural New South Wales, he co-founded Agassins in 2014 and was the Chief Operating Officer before coming CEO in 2019 and he's overseeing the development and trial program of the E. Sheppard product. He's passionate about bringing positive change to the agricultural industry via digital paddock technology. Welcome Jason. Our second panel member is Hugo Lamejera, hi Hugo, who's a strategic advisor from FireSA but Hugo was all around the traps in innovation in Adelaide. I've worked with Hugo in many ways. He has over 25 years experience in startup listed and multinational organizations in the USA, Europe and Australia and he specializes in developing investing in high growth businesses and teams and being from FireSA he's going to particularly focus on how we might protect buildings and people from the ravages of fire. And next is Andy Caronius, who is the CEO of the recently established SmartSat CRC building on our really magnificent strength in the space area here. Many of you will know the Co-operative Research Centre program but it's a consortium that brings together industry and research organizations. In his case I think almost 100 members. I don't envy you that one Andy. But the CRC is developing game changing satellite technologies that will catapult us into the global space economy. And finally Dr Mark Rice, he's a co-founder from Safety from Space. Safety from Space is working on a new safety system for locations too far from wireless coverage. Mark is an electronic engineer with 25 years experience in senior leadership, technical and business roles. Please join me in making them feel welcome. So just to start with as a further introduction I've introduced the individuals but I'd like to have each panel member say a little bit about their organizations and the focus. We'll start with you Mark. Thank you. Good afternoon. So I'll just say a little bit about Safety from Space. It was started in 2018 and the idea is to provide emergency connectivity and management solutions for people in remote locations using next generation satellite based technologies. Business was supported by UniSA Innovation and Collaboration Centre. I've got the T-shirt on and many thanks to all the support they gave me in many different ways. And I've been working very closely with the Australian Maritime Safety Authority which is responsible for search and rescue in Australia and various other Australian emergency responders who are helping me with defining future systems. So that also includes airborne and uneven spaceborne systems and in particular we've got interest from NASA which is good. Thank you Mark. Andy. Thank you Leanna and thank you for inviting me to speak to you. I start by saying that there are some 50 countries that have satellites that we's over our country on a daily basis multiple times a day. 50 countries can actually see what happens in your backyard but we don't have any. And yes we were told before in the previous panel and before that the price of satellite images is coming down but it's other people's satellite images and they can increase the price or they can even stop having those made available to us and we feel that that is something that it's really an un-Australian because we lead in so many areas and yet we're not leading in satellite technologies. So we thought here in South Australia we'll change that and we built a consortium of industry universities and government as Leanna said more than 100 partners. We raised $245 million in R&D and 55 million was given by our federal government and my thanks also goes to our state government for their support in the CRC and we've built an R&D organization that will actually build Australia's capability in three areas. First of all in advanced communications and we do need it. Connectivity, the stuff that Mirota is doing and so on but also in greater capability and analytics in Earth observation and remote sensing and thirdly and possibly more importantly is to make satellites smarter and that's why we call it the smarts at CRC to actually put AI algorithms, machine learning, deep learning algorithms on the platform itself. The farmers are not interested in data. The farmers are interested in what was said before actionable information or prescriptions on how to do things and that's what the next generation of satellites will do. They will image the Earth but also give you the information that you need. So we are excited about building those new technologies for Australia, building new jobs or building an industry but more importantly also transforming mining, agriculture, defence, transport and logistics and so on. Thank you. Thank you Andy. Here you go. Thanks Ianna. I thought I'd start with a story. I'm from FireSA and we have a product over there called FireGuard but this is sort of a personal thing for me. I remember when I was a kid, I was 14 years old and I looked up at the Adelaide Hills and I watched the fire front coming in from Ash Wednesday and I was wondering whether I was going to have to evacuate. I was in the city three kays away from it. I'll never forget it. What I didn't know was at the same time about 500 kays away, 400, my future wife was hiding in a lake underneath a Hessian sack, underneath an upturned boat and a fireball was coming over their property and I remember my father-in-law saying it was as high as the gum trees and it was coming right over them and they were sitting in front of the house and the fire front went right over them and the air was sucked out and the heat was there and the smoke was there. Afterwards they came out of the lake and they had four other kids from the local school there whose parents hadn't been able to get them. Everyone was safe. It was fantastic. Not so good for others in the area but what happened was the fire had missed their house. It had come right up to it and then gone across and it took out all the outbuildings. Everything was on fire. So the kids went into the house and they sat there and the parents went out and started fighting the fire. The kids came running out about an hour and a half later saying the house was on fire, the house was on fire and what had happened is embers had got in underneath the house. They'd started a fire. So they spent the next two hours trying to put the fire out and at the end of that all the outhouses were gone, all the other buildings were gone. They'd lost everything and they spent the next two days trying to look after the animals or looking after what was left of the farm. And I guess the long and the short of that is that even now, 25 years later, my wife still struggles to light a barbecue because she's still affected by the fire. So for me it's all about how do we save people? How do we allow them to make different decisions? And so luckily I met Graham who's up the back there and about five years ago he was talking about the system that would turn on a sprinkler system that would automate it and so today we're sort of unveiling for the first time the fire guard system. And what I might do is just ask if we could put the video on. I've got a little 30 second video because it says much better than I can how the system works. Thanks Hugo. It's quite an impressive story. I can remember that fire. It was really scary stuff seeing the lofty on fire. So the beauty of our bush anyway does tend to come back. I remember running up. We had this horrible run. I used to do torture ridge where you'd run from the city up to Mount Lofty and it was just black and bare. But you know a few years later it was all green again. So it's a beauty of our own climate I guess. So, Jason. Thanks Lena. Agesens was founded in 2014 with the purpose in mind of automating the movement of livestock and since that time we've raised over 25 million dollars in capital or private and today we're about 45 people and looking to commercialize our technology and begin sales later this year in Queensland. The product itself consists of a neck band that sits on the ridge of the livestock. We focus today on beef cattle only and that animal is able to be trained through our training protocol and from then you can then create as many fences as you like and maintain a fence around the mob. The primary advantages of using this of course is around past utilisation, rotational grazing and increasing the long-term value of your property. And so with that we plan to then commercialise later this year. Thank you Lena. Thank you Jason. Now I'd like to ask a question around, I'm going to centre it around the Kangaroo Island fires because it's so real to us and to start with Mark and Andy and I'd like you to say what could have been different? If we had activated some of the technologies that you have or will have in future, it doesn't necessarily have to be here right now but what might have happened in the early stages of those fires that we could have controlled them without them becoming the disaster that they were? Thank you. Well, I think on many levels things could have been done better with better technology. At the moment we do have and we're very lucky and very grateful to the Japanese for using the weather satellite, in fact the satellite that we use for our weather, is very late to give us images of the fire front I think it's every 10 minutes, in fact they actually increase that temporary resolution just for us. But of course the resolution of that because it is so far high up because it's a geostationary satellite the resolution of that is a couple of kilometres. So therefore by the time that the fire builds to 2 kilometres wide all of the satellite can detect it is far too late. There are the LIOS, the low earth orbiting satellites like the Sentinel and others that we use but again they have a resolution of about 60 metres but they pass over every 12 hours. So in terms of detection we could have done a lot better by having our own constellation of satellites that are tasked and controlled to be able to detect the fire much, much sooner. Now this is a longer term strategy, in the shorter term what we could have done is actually use some very clever algorithms to be able to bring together many satellites, the data of many satellites and fuse it together together with some in situ technologies at the moment the infrared cameras and the cameras and the stuff that you actually just showed but on a larger scale could have given us detection of the fires much, much earlier than we could have otherwise had or like we had at the moment and that's where the technology is likely to go with IoT devices becoming so inexpensive it would be much easier for us to actually have that detection of fusing the data from satellites and validating it within situ sensors. So that's in the detection but also in the response, communications and situational awareness are critical. The fire crew needs to know what is happening the fire crew needs to know where the firefighters are and in fact all the emergency workers and humans and in fact even livestock but they need to know exactly what is happening in the situation room when they are fighting the fire they need to have advanced information about how the fire front is moving towards a particular direction and all of that technology with communications and IoT and particularly with the automatic identification systems the work that Mark is doing actually will enable us in the future to do a far better detection response and indeed recovery as well. Thanks Andy, Mark. Thanks Andy, I totally agree with all of that. I think just to add a bit more to that we have a lot of great technologies which can be brought to bear like the detection it's combining those and providing the information in a timely manner to the right people. So it's doing the gathering of the data being able to analyse it in real time and trying to take what someone said and taking the humans out the loop to some extent in terms of automating some of these processes so that the right people can get that information quickly. I think there's a key point in this type of situation is providing highly reliable and resilient connectivity so that the problem with a bushfire is the intensity is such that it can take out a lot of infrastructure so you just can't rely on anything. So satellite is going to survive that kind of situation it will be there and there are ways to use it in combination with the existing infrastructure but you've got to have something as a fallback. At the moment the systems are pretty basic and what we really want is to be able to allow teams to work as a team, coordinate between them have that information about where the other members are so that it can be distributed and they can see where the bodies are in a critical situation and take action. Thanks Mike. I did read an article originally that claimed that we have the technology now to detect fires very early so drones for example could be detecting smoldering early fires which then if you had the response systems in place you could zap in with chemicals or whatever so we would never get to that point. Do you agree with that or have we got a way to go with the technology? I agree with you. Yes I agree that a lot of the technology is available and I think it's not that it should be one solution or another the beauty and the challenge is to actually integrate those solutions to integrate satellite based space born assets with airborne as well as drones and in fact in situ and at the moment we don't have that capability of that integration of the data in a way that provides us advance warning you can't just have drones up there just in case you want to have drones as the first I guess alert once you have already detected something to go and investigate further your whole crew to go and fight a fire that was actually an error because it was a cloud or something. Thank you and Hugo in terms of what could have happened in protection of buildings with fire systems such as you have I had the benefit I guess while it existed of being down at Southern Ocean Lodge I had a half price special so I went down there Magnificent facility and they did show me their sprinkler systems which looked to me very impressive but obviously with a strength of fire it didn't work do we have systems coming up that could prevent that kind of damage in that extreme situation? I guess when you have a big enough fire there's not a lot you can do the more water you throw at it the more energy it needs to put in to burn something so the more water you have the safer you'll be you either take out the oxygen you take out the fuel or you use water to remove the energy so they're the things you can do I guess where we see the sort of systems that we're developing Graham is a CFS firefighter for the last 30 years he was seeing that the people in his CFS unit were losing their homes the CFS will go out they'll fight the fire that's the last thing they do they'll protect property that's the second thing they do first thing they do is save life so if we can find ways to make it so that your property is safer and maybe not actually out there trying to put out the property fire necessarily but they might be out there trying to fight the fire then perhaps we won't have such big fires I know from my family's experience the CFS never made it to their farm that was just not the way it went there were too many other things going on so I mean ultimately I think technologies like this and you alluded to it as well if we have a network of enough of these systems set up we'll be able to pick up the fire and you'll be able to then take that information as long as the networks are still available and be able to put that back up into the CFS systems and say actually in fact guys we've got embers coming down over here here and here you may not know it they can fly 5, 10 Ks ahead now we can say where the firefronts might be starting as the systems activate Thanks Hugo now Jason virtual fencing it's not approved yet in South Australia but let's assume it was in that fire to the livestock versus the fencing systems we currently have and would it be cost effective here and now for farmers to in rebuilding because there's a lot of rebuilding offences going on to be using virtual instead of real offences so I get the hard question you get the hard question well I think there's a couple of things and I think that we shouldn't while there's many there was a few people who did lose their lives there was also countless animals that also lost their lives and this is the livelihood of many farmers it's the way that they put bread on the table and their kids to school and everything else and it's not only that but it's just the inhumane way in which they die virtual fencing like all technologies that have been described here today I think has a place in preventing in terms of the rescue, the recovery and how that goes about can be a variety of ways I see that virtual fencing because with our technology you know where the animals are at any point in time so if there is an alert or an understanding of where the fire front is then you're able to then place a virtual fence and move those animals and you're able to move them to a certain part of the paddock, they've already been trained they understand the response and so in terms of the fire and once that starts then you have that sense of knowing it the other aspect is also the animal welfare agencies, the people who do the rescue and recovery, the RSPCA they could then get access to that data to know where the animals are and while the human rescue site is going the animal rescue site could also happen as well in terms of fencing they I do see the virtual fencing because there's an infinite number of ways of putting a fence on a property that it is a cost effective way of doing it however there's always a place for a physical fence and I think as the property scales up the cost benefit is there particularly for much larger farms and if they have concentration of a lot of subdivisions within their farm then that is also for the E Shepherd it's also a very cost effective way of doing that so after a the fence is being destroyed certainly a boundary fence would still need to be in place because of your neighbour and keeping control about the internal you could always put a collar on your neighbour that's right it's usually partners that they want to put their collar on so I think but then the recovery is also just knowing where the animals are so after a fire event in the event that a front, a fire front is coming the fence can be deactivated so the animals are not being trapped and if they do run and escape they can go somewhere then you can then find your animals afterwards either and to bring them back so I think virtual fencing combined with the fact that we also know where the animals are and where they're moving can be an effective tool for helping in that rescue and recovery thank you Jason you handled the hard question well we just have time for a couple of quick questions if anyone has him please in the middle there Andrew Coppin from Farm Bot what are your insights again whilst our primary interest is managing farm water and IOT to the extent that Agtech can assist in emergency recovery since the fires given we monitor thousands of water tanks we have been approached by the bush fire brigade who want to be able to pinpoint tanks and know in real time and what fittings are on the tank so that the fire brigade can access it quickly in our research with our farming clients we found out that 70% of them were in the bush fire brigade anyway so the prospects of them sharing their water insights with the fire brigade didn't present any major issues and in Victoria it actually has an additional benefit and I think this will end up being a national standard we're not sure about the rules here but if the fire brigade take your water to defend your house or other property and they have a requirement to return it the benefit of knowing with our device how much water was taken is they know exactly how much to return so we've sort of walked into a win-win-win scenario in the scheme of fire management by monitoring water in real time and again we use a satellite for 80% of what we do so more a comment to add to the discussion about how AgTech can help in this and obviously we're doing all we can to work with the fire brigades to end farmers to provide that access so I do think there are really opportunities here for those of us in the remote sensing and AgTech businesses to consider such solutions as sidelines to our core business. That's a fantastic pragmatic opportunity. Anyone one more quick question? Oh sorry down the front Emma. So the question that Emma asked is why we're not able to commercially operate in South Australia with our technology. There's regulations in South Australia that prevent the sale and use of collars that provide electrical stimulus to animals other than cats and dogs and so we're sort of tied up and stuck between that legislation so that's what prevents it Queensland and Tasmania are the only states that we can operate. Yes and the pulse isn't as much as an electric fence either and then they eventually respond to just an audio cue so in terms of the animal benefits it's a lot better. Thank you. Thank you for the question Emma. And please join me in thanking the panel members. Thank you very much for your time and insights.