VETERAN agricultural writer and Farm Weekly Torque columnist and machinery writer Ken Wilson has retired
After 54 years as a journalist - 42 of those dedicated to writing about agriculture and 26 of them writing specifically about agricultural machinery - Ken, 73, finished work last Friday.
And he left with his own degree in agriculture, considering the Wheatbelt to be his "university" and the multitude of farmers he has talked with as his "professors".
"Everything I know about agriculture I learned from granddad and dad (growing up on the family farm near Cunderdin) and through talking to farmers - and I'm still learning, that's the most exciting bit," Ken said this week as he prepared his final Torque Talk column and machinery stories for Farm Weekly.
Complete with numerous media and agricultural industry awards and achievements, his career is unlikely to be replicated in a modern media landscape.
The awards included seven from the Rural Press Club of WA - three for Best News Story, two for Best Feature and two for Best Finance Story - Fairfax Rural Awards for Best On-Farm story in 2011 and 2013 and the Farm Machinery & Industry Association (FMIA) John Lynn Memorial Award for excellence in the farm mechanisation industry in 2015.
FMIA last month also recognised Ken's career and his support for the industry with a special presentation at its annual general meeting.
While the recognition is valued, cherished by Ken are thousands of personal friendships formed across the full agricultural spectrum and right throughout regional WA.
They sprouted from on-farm interviews in Ken's quest to bring to readers an operator's views of a new machine, a new process or a new variety.
"One of the greatest things I have enjoyed about this game is the genuineness of the people I meet - the farming people are just genuine, wonderful people," Ken said.
"It has been a great pleasure for me to meet so many wonderful people through my job who have turned out to be wonderful friends - farming is still a people game.
"You have to get on, you have to tolerate, you have to have patience, you have to have a lot of good qualities to be a farmer and, in hard times, these qualities have to come out for the farm to survive.
"Farmers have demonstrated that decade after decade."
He and wife Mary Jane plan to visit some of those friends and some of the interesting places he flashed past on his way to a job somewhere else - now his daily routine is likely to take a more leisurely pace.
No doubt his dulcet tones will continue to be heard on phone message banks and answering machines across regional WA for some time yet.
The north is also calling, with a trip in the early planning stages along the Gibb River Road through the Kimberley with his sons and sons-in-law - Ken has three sons, four daughters and 13 grandchildren.
While renowned for occasional battles with office technology and expenses accounting system changes, Ken has an ability to understand extremely complex mechanical, electronic and automated systems in agriculture.
He can explain them in simple, straightforward terminology.
The 42 years he has covered advances in farming are, he claims, "the most exciting in the history of agriculture".
But he believes the young guns of farming "will take it to the next level" in the future.
He has watched as broadacre machinery has trebled in horsepower, size and capacity and in many cases gone from tow-behind PTO-driven to self-propelled, self-steered and with primary functions automated to minimise operator error.
Ken has covered introduction and evolution of technology - some simple like tungsten points, some complex like direct-drill seeding - that at the time was quite literally ground breaking and brought changes, but is now such an accepted part of farming it hardly rates a second thought.
He believes the technological advances will continue.
"There will be fundamental changes - that's the history of agriculture," Ken said.
"I would say within 10 years we are going to be seeing hybrid automation, we'll still see cabs with operators in them but they'll have primarily a monitoring role - we are already seeing driverless tractors.
"In the mid-1970s John Shearer brought out a hydraulic chisel plough - that was an absolute breakthrough, that really ushered in hydraulics.
"The next big thing I think will be electrics - that will replace hydraulics.
"We've already got hybrid electric over hydraulics, but full-blown electrics will be the next thing, so it will be electric tractors - they'll be the prime movers."
Electrics and electronics will help overcome engineering problems associated with the size and power of modern farm machinery, Ken believes.
Big horsepower diesel motors, already facing a limited foreseeable future in Europe, are likely to be replaced by electric motors, not just in tractor wheels but also the wheels of implements, with motors linked as one by electronics, he said.
Rather than machines continuing to grow in the size, electronics will link teams of machines working together.
"That's already happening in the United States, it's called the master and slave system so the lead tractor sets the position in the paddock for the rest," Ken said.
You will have three, four, five headers taking a crop off in one paddock, then all leaving that paddock and going down a laneway to start the next paddock - farms will be specifically designed for that.
"They'll have dedicated traffic laneways through the farm and there won't be any gates unless they have livestock - you can't imagine once they set this up that they would introduce livestock.
"With spraying you won't need these 120 foot (36.6 metres) or 160ft (48.5m) booms, it'll go back to almost insect-like machines that can get down low in the crop and go between the rows and just spray specific targets and they'll be operating 24 hours, seven days a week.
"Already there's a company that has developed what they call a beehive - you put it in a central position on the property and the drones come out of it, fly to the designated paddock, do their job and return to the beehive to be resupplied.
"Swarmbots will probably refer to seedings rigs and tractors."
Ken believes change will be required to accommodate impacts of climate change and a drying climate.
"At the end of the day, despite all of the education, all of the information, all the technology we now have, 95 per cent of the (agricultural) equation is rain - how much and when," he said.
"We are going to need the CY O'Connors of the next decade to look at things like damming of the Fitzroy River and seeing how we can get water down from Kununurra for a move into pivot irrigation.
"It may mean the area below the Fitzroy becomes the new Wheatbelt for WA.
"There has to be some out-of-the-box thinking by governments to start planning for this - a 40-year or 50-year plan.
"We know we have water, but we've got to be clever about how we access it.
"My feeling is pivot irrigation has got to become the norm.
"It's being done in Denver (in the US) and to a certain extent Twiggy (Andrew Forrest) and Gina (Gina Rinehart) are starting to do that up north.
"You can't eat iron ore."
In the more immediate future, Ken sees liquids dominating in fertiliser and crop establishment.
"I'd say within five years we are going to have a lot more liquid dominated systems establishing crops because the chemistry is getting so good at being able to get mixes together of nutrients - your NPKs, copper, moly, zinc, even fungicides - it all goes in-furrow in one mix, one pass," he said.
"That's a cost efficiency system that's going to have to come in because at the end of the day agriculture's is a gross margin story."
Ken's coverage of agriculture has also included an impartial look at aspects of the industry not necessarily deemed good news stories.
The demise of many Australian manufacturers - some of them with histories going back more than 100 years - in his time, is one of those issues.
"We had Australian companies that were leading the world, companies such as Napier Grasslands and Connor Shea - there's some argument about who was first - which developed the first air seeder in the world, later copied by the Canadians," Ken said.
"We were making our own tractors - Chamberlain had a big following throughout Australia - we made our own combines - Horwood Bagshaw, John Shearer, Connor Shea, Napier Grasslands - and on a lot of that stuff the US was still playing catch-up.
"We were fairly self-sufficient in our manufacturing of machinery but cost pressures and our lack of critical mass finally took its toll.
"While it took some time for the likes of Massey Ferguson and Ford at that stage, International Harvester, New Holland and John Deere to come in - it was almost like bracket creep with the volumes those companies had the ability to supply and that knocked Australian manufacturing for six."
The demise of rural communities through the aggregation of farm properties, corporate involvement in agriculture and other social pressures is another story that for Ken is not good news.
"Economies of scale are so pivotal to the success of farming," he said.
"You have to assume that corporate farming is going to be the way to go in the future, replacing 'mum and dad' farms.
"Everywhere I go in the bush I see towns dying - there are exceptions of course, like Kalannie - but for most, their local football team is the canary in the coal mine.
"If they have to pay players to come up from Perth because they can't field their own football team then they are in trouble."
Ironically it was football that pointed Ken towards a career in journalism.
He broke a leg playing football at school and in the forced layoff began writing match reports for the school.
His interest in writing remained during a cadetship with Dalgety NZL and he applied for and got a job in 1966 at the Daily News, covering courts before joining the sports department, writing mainly football and golf and ghost writing columns for other commentators such as Graham 'Polly' Farmer, Haydn Bunton, Barry Cable, Mal Atwell and golfer Graham Marsh.
But having grown up on a wheat and sheep farm and, as an eight-year-old, driving a Lanz Bulldog tractor - which is now on display in the museum at Dardanup Heritage Park - Ken retained an interest in agriculture and machinery.
After a stint as a sports reporter with The Sunday Independent, he was approached by the Western Farmer & Grazier to be magazine's editor where he covered the first Wagin Woolorama, Newdegate Field Day and Mingenew Expo.
He later became machinery editor for Western Farmer & Grazier.
When Rural Press took over Western Farmer & Grazier and also Elders Weekly, he was asked to go to Elders Weekly where he was appointed editor before returning to the newly named Farm Weekly as grains writer and agripolitical writer in the early 1990s, before specialising in writing about machinery.
His work has taken him to the US, Canada and Germany for new model releases, interstate many times and throughout WA.
In the 26 years since Elders Weekly became Farm Weekly, work colleagues have become used to Ken's habit of arriving very early to get his copy written on the days he was not on the road.
They also became used to his standard comment to one and all as he left for the day: "Thanks for being on the show".
It is now an appropriate time for fellow journalists, agriculture machinery manufacturers and sellers and innovators and experimenters he has encouraged and supported over the years and for farmers generally to say to Ken Wilson in a heartfelt way: "Thank you for being on the show".
