Robotic revolution for farming now here

Mr Bate farms at Emerald, in Central Queensland, in a family farming operation that grows 1620 hectares of cereals with a mix of summer and winter crop and feedlots 2000 head of cattle.

This commercial farming operation has played a key part in Mr Bate’s move to develop the use of robots in Australian agriculture.

He had a captive audience at the recent SEPWA Harvest Review at Esperance where he told a room of farmers about the journey he has been on in developing robotic farming technology.

“Our farming system is zero till with controlled traffic, running best practice in all our farming operations over the years,” Mr Bate said.

“It occurred to me that everything we are doing out in the paddock was based on what we could tip into the spray tank and what we could hook onto the back of the tractor.

“If it didn’t fit that paradigm, then it didn’t happen in the paddock, as it wasn’t considered possible.

“We farm in a coal mining boom and when the mining boom went through everyone was struggling to get staff, but we were lucky as we had good long-term staff and we expanded and bought more farms and got on the band wagon of bigger machinery.

“As farmers, we have all been geared up over the past 20-30 years that to be more efficient you had to get bigger, had to farm more country and get bigger machinery to get over more acres in a day.

“I have always believed that the difference between good farmers and average farmers is timing, the guys who get the job done on time are normally the good farmers.”

Mr Bate said the journey into robotics was about what was the best way to grow a crop. 

“How can we use robots to create better farming systems, to be more efficient to use fertiliser more efficiently and how can we produce better produce because of that?” he said.

“At the end of the day the bigger machinery was getting across the ground and getting stuff done on time, but we weren’t growing as good a crops as we used to.

“That is where SwarmFarm came from. 

“If we are robotic we don’t have to be big any more, we can redesign our machinery around our farming system and re-define our farming systems around technology and work out better ways to plant crops and better ways to produce food.

“Robots opened up new options in the field and in agriculture we are at the point with robotics that ultimately things are changing and there are new opportunities now about how we plant our crops and how we grow our crops.”

Mr Bate said a key focus for SwarmFarm in developing robots was to make them as simple as possible and to ensure they worked in true farming conditions.

“SwarmFarm started from the soil up and not technology down,” he said.

“When we started seven years ago, the only robotics you saw were in the military. 

“We partnered with two universities to create our first prototypes and it was a big step because usually the university sector develops something and pushes it on industry.

“This was the other way around, where we dragged the unis with us to develop what we wanted.

“So we spent three years in the university sector and learnt a lot and made a few mistakes but we came out with enough technology to create SwarmFarm.

“We employed our first guy three years ago and now we have a team of 15 staff.

“All of our team is based in rural Australia, at Emerald and we are one of only a few companies in the world that you can buy a robot from and have it delivered.

“We have 9000 hours of field work on our robots now, they are real and have scratches on them, we have broken them and we have fixed them but we have made them real.

“There is an order book of 20 robots to go out this year and we delivered the first one in November last year to a turf farm in Brisbane and it mows turf, day in-day-out.”

So what does robotics look like in farming?

Mr Bate said there would be smaller machines, that were more nimble and lighter for less soil compaction.

“The whole idea was to break the technology into small pieces that farmers could use and fix and set up themselves,” he said.

“Technology in our farm machinery has become so complicated and so hard to set up that it almost overwhelms us, yet we are so reliant on these machines to keep our operations going.

“With our robots we have made them as simple as we can, they have a diesel motor and a few pumps to run it. 

“Everything on it has been designed on a system we call ‘swapnostics’, where you can swap everything out in 45 minutes – for example, the entire wiring loom comes out in 45 minutes.

“Our philosophy is to make technology simple and useable and allow farmers to fix it themselves if they have to.”

Mr Bate said spraying programs was an example of where robots could revolutionise farming.

“People say ‘I have to get over all my country in seven or 10 days after a rain before the weeds get too big’,” he said.

“A small robot can’t do that, but what we do is scale the robots so a small farm has one and a large farm has many to ensure that timing.

“What is really important and a challenge is to rethink the agronomy and how robots fit into farming. 

“We are not there to replace the spray rig we are there to implement a better spraying program.

“If you have a robot running around the clock spraying, you won’t get those bigger weeds.”

Mr Bate said the ‘here and now’ of robotics was that it was real and it was happening.

“What we are going to see is new farming systems and new techniques and it is just a matter of where growers want to go with it,” he said.