Panel discussion with presenters Tom Holcombe from SwarmFarm Robotics (Qld), Tom Coggan from Meandarra (Qld), James Venning from Barunga Grains (SA) and Jess Koch from Booleroo Centre (SA).
After lunch on Thursday, Converge Esperance agriculture steam participants sat for an afternoon-long seminar about automated farming with presenters from as far afield as Queensland.
Bindi Isbister from Agrarian Management in Geraldton facilitated the session to help give growers the information they needed to pave the way to autonomy.
“We’re starting to hear a lot about autonomous systems and we’re seeing robots in the paddock, but there’s a lot of steps that we need to go through to get them working efficiently,” she said.
“So today was about providing them with some information to help them streamline that adoption and basically get their systems ready for automation.”
Ms Isbister said automation provided opportunities to automate routine farming tasks and try and improve operational efficiency.
“The scope was looking at how we can one get ready for automation in terms of setting up good boundaries, because they’re going to be the foundation of all of our data transfer,” she said.
Automation does require good connectivity and lots of digital transfer of data to- and from.Â
“Getting ready and getting our digital farm set up is one thing, which is going to be like our filing system.”
Ms Isbister said they also looked at a several components that were not automated processes that could be done now.
“They’re not fully automated, but they’re ones that we could actually do on the farm now, such as variable rate applications of fertiliser or deep ripping or spraying,” she said.
“And then also the importance of on-farm trials and how to collect good data from the trials so that we can then use them to inform our management decisions.”
At the conclusion of the seminar the presenters took questions in a panel discussion before participants in the Industry stream joined them for drinks at the bar.
