Farmer asks: "Taxi industry, or uber?"

This was the question 2017 Nuffield scholar Matthew Fealy poised to producers in Melbourne last week. The manager of Blue Sky Produce at Mareeba in Queensland, grows mangoes, avocados and Tahitian limes on 153 acres and was speaking at the annual Nuffield conference.

He said robotics and automation have the potential to not just improve on-farm horticulture production, but also eliminate labour shortage risks – if Australian growers were willing to be at the forefront and adopt new technology.

Mr Fealy said automation was not just about costs, but also the balance of power, and he saw harvest staff as his greatest business risk.

“We spend all that money right up to the point of harvesting then rely on backpackers to pick it,” he said.

“Protectionism politics is getting more popular. Migration workforces are becoming very out of vogue, even in Australia. If we don’t have the working visa holiday program who is going to pick your fruit? Realistically, if we get another announcement like the backpacker’s tax and lose our workforce, the alternative is we will have millions of dollars of crop falling off the trees.”

Mr Fealy said the question he most often gets asked was “are robots going to take our jobs?”, but he sees it as an emerging new employment opportunity.

“The new industry is going to require some skilled labour for the sales, service and support of this new line of machinery,” he said.

“I think this is an exciting time and exciting opportunity to build new industries in rural communities to service and support these machines.”

Mr Fealy travelled to the US, Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel, and found the autonomous application of repetitive tasks was a game changer for the industry.

He visited a Dutch farm running a Precision Makers tractor, which could be used both as a regular manned machine, or autonomously via the company’s greenbot technology.

It has been in operation for three years, was now averaging three autonomous hours a day completing the entire spray and slashing operations, and the farmer said he had already got a return on investment.

At $75,000, Mr Fealy said having done the sums conservatively, the machine would also make a return on investment in his operation within three years.

The use of machine vision to accurately forecast crops was a key focus of all international researchers in the area, Mr Fealy said, as supply and demand was the biggest determining factor of income in food production.

“Everywhere in the world I went I saw this machine vision application and they were achieving accuracies of about 60 per cent – this doesn’t sound very accurate, but it is a lot more accurate than what we currently have which is walking out into the orchard, counting a few trees and averaging it out over the orchard,” he said.

Central Queensland University has developed a device which could be retrofitted to on-farm machinery, and combined with micro-climate sensors to develop a heat map of where the mature fruit was in the orchard.

“Imagine my Woolworths or Coles buyer calls me and says I want 10 pallets of size 23 avocados,” he said.

“I can pipe this data into a machine that can go out there and pick that fruit off that tree. The technology is there – this works.”

But it is up to Australia producers to lift their knowledge of technology be at the forefront of adoption.

 “There is a big jump in the tech literacy required to adopt this technology to what most farmers have today and I believe the greatest kick start to that literacy will be an incentive, something like a 150pc tax incentive for the adoption of robust mature technology like fully autonomous watering systems, fertigation systems, farm management platforms.”