WHILE the level of agricultural technology on offer can be overwhelming at times, one speaker at the recent Southern Dirt TECHSPO urged growers to stay involved.
David Lamb is the chief scientist at the Food Agility CRC, which is a $150 million, 10-year industry transformation hub that works with technology developments and researchers on behalf of producers.
Professor Lamb is also a McClymont distinguished professor of the University of New England, based at Armidale, New South Wales, which was the home of Australia's first smart farm.
He said the large amount of data that can now be collected on farms brought with it a challenge.
"You can bring that data into the farmhouse or farm office, but is that where you want it, when you want it and the form you want it?" he said.
"Is it going to support instantaneous decision making when we are on the road, in the yards, on the bike or at the kids' soccer training?
"Can we access what we need from there, as well as the farmhouse?"
Professor Lamb said it had been proven that tech innovation can improve productivity on farms.
"Connected devices can increase gross value of production by almost 25 per cent - that was revealed in an economic study conducted in the Precision Agriculture for Decision Agriculture project, which was supported by 13 research development centres two years ago," he said.
"There are automation and labour saving benefits, genetic gains and objective data around animals and plants that leads to these gains."
Professor Lamb said whether we liked it or not, the future was getting richer and richer with data.
"We want tech innovation on farms but it also permeates through the value chain, including agronomy and animal and livestock science and access to finance," he said.
"Tech is all over us, but research is also still really important.
"It is no surprise that start ups are now realising there are knowledge gaps as they scale up.
"So researchers like myself, how do we act to give developers and innovators what they need right now?"
The other challenge that remains is telecommunications issues.
"In Australia, the acute problem is we still have 1000 miles to go," he said.
"You can walk into a farm office you see wonderful network on farm, streaming back to gateway and from there goes into cloud and gets processed and analysed and goes back into our network," professor Lamb said.
"But the opportunity exists in looking at putting the analytics right at the sharp edge of where the technology is working.
"More than 60pc of Australian farmers rely on the mobile network for their mainstream broadband access and that mobile network gives rise to a bone of contention."
Professor Lamb said there was another opportunity in terms of the "Internet of Old Things".
"How many devices and boxes are connectable around the sheds and yards and yet you can't get them talking to each other because they are a different colour," he said.
"What I am talking about there is an opportunity to invest in backbones that allow machines that don't talk to each other, to talk to each other.
"So there is a wonderful opportunity there, but it is not easy.
"We need more devices out there and the internet to take a role, but we can also work on getting old things connected and operating in our new world."
Professor Lamb urged farmers to get involved and to link with start ups and be "guinea pigs".
"There is a viable and vibrant start up ecosystem around the country," he said.
"In the past year 25 start ups received substantial venture capital to move into ag tech.
"The year before it was 20 and the year before that it was 16 - so it is growing.
"Farmers are ultimately a translator community, this technology won't go anywhere if you are not engaged.
"You are the sense check of what is going on and we need to be mentoring our start up culture, otherwise it will spin out of control.
"The producer is in the middle of an enormous amount of data coming from all different angles, try and make sense of it, aggregate it and put it to action.
"That is the value of us as translators - if someone is putting a gadget on your farm you need to be the one putting it on a sheep or a gate, or in the ground.
"Ag innovation is not a white collar job, you the farmers have a major role to play."
Professor Lamb said ag innovation was in somewhat of a lull period at the moment as companies look to increase scale.
"If you look back over the past couple of years, there are a whole heap of start ups working to scale up and offer a stable product in the marketplace," he said.
"The key ingredient in a scale up is trust from consumers, but to trust it you have to understand it.
"This is the quiet period in any start ups life, working on getting a stable business so people will buy their product and it is a challenge."
Professor Lamb said it was an exciting time to be in agriculture, with a lot of ideas on the way.
"At the end of the day, farmers are looking for simplicity but you have to go through complexity to get it," he said.
"You cannot afford not to be guinea pigs.
"There are some wonderful innovations that are at start up or scaled up stage and you need to be a translator, be a host, be a facilitator, be a part of their and your own agile process.
"Test it, take it back, change it and be ready, because it is all coming."
