RECIPIENT of a medal in the Order of Australia (OAM), Quentin Egerton-Warburton - known to most simply as Kent Warburton - nearly deleted his Queen's Birthday honour acceptance.
When an email marked 'official' from the Office of the Official Secretary to the Governor General, Government House, Canberra, appeared in his inbox, the retired Mobrup sheep farmer turned self-taught computer programmer, was wary.
The tech savvy 79-year-old - who wrote the first four versions of the Agrimaster farm financial management software program now used by about half of Western Australia's farmers and more than 4000 farmers nationally - suspected it was an online scammer phishing for personal information.
He was unaware son and daughter-in-law, David and Natalie Egerton-Warburton had nominated him for an OAM.
The couple head the Mastergroup company which markets Agrimaster software and is developing a seventh version that will still retain elements of the first written more then 40 years ago for his own use.
Mr Egerton-Warburton and wife Mary agonised for a day whether to click the 'accept' button, as the email directed, until they verified the phone number on the email was actually that of Government House, Canberra and had called to confirm the letter and OAM were genuine.
Last Monday, Mr Egerton-Warburton was one of 47 Western Australians named in the Queen's Birthday Honours and one of 428 Australians awarded an OAM.
But his was the only honour awarded for service to the agricultural technology industry - a branch of agriculture likely to become increasingly important for Australia's export earnings and food production capability into the future.
Described by his family as very humble, practical and a pragmatic problem solver, Mr Egerton-Warburton was raised on a Merino sheep property near Kojonup.
He is a fifth generation of a Great Southern farming family that traces its WA origins back to George Egerton-Warburton, who arrived in Albany in 1839, only 10 years after the Swan River Colony was founded.
He went to a local primary school then boarded at Guildford Grammar from age eight, until graduating, before heading east to be a jackaroo on Bundamar, a property in central New South Wales, north west of Dubbo.
After a couple of years he returned to WA and took up his own farm, Korellup at Mobrup, in 1965 and over the years built it up to about 2000 hectares and running 15,000 Merinos or more.
He met Mary, a Perth girl who visited Mobrup, at an engagement party.
They married and had three children, Megan, David and Robert, before Mr Egerton-Warburton tried his hand at computer programming - purely as a hobby which took over from photography - producing what became known as Agrimaster which won an Australian Design Award in 1989 for version three.
Described by his family as a good and thrifty farmer - he considered new equipment a "depreciating asset" but maintained what he had in good condition - Mr Egerton-Warburton was always interested in innovation.
In 1967 in his mid-20s, he joined a group of farmers providing their farms' financial information to what was known as the Farm Management Service laboratory, established by Henry Schapper and Roger Mauldon, of The University of WA's School of Agriculture.
This was long before desktop or personal computers became available, back in the day when computers quite literally filled rooms at universities, a few government offices and a handful of specialist corporations.
"You'd fill out details of your farm budget at the start of the year and then regularly put details of receipts and invoices on the forms they gave you and posted it up to Perth," Mr Egerton-Warburton recalled this week.
"People at the Farm Management Service laboratory would input all this information into the computer using punch cards and at the end of the month you'ld get back what was called the budget comparison report and you compared what had happened with what you had expected to happen.
"That was the basis of the whole thing."
He stayed with the university program until 1981 when his own program and personal computers replaced it, enabling farmers to enter information and make the comparisons at home.
Mr Egerton-Warburton admits to being "fascinated by things I don't understand" and computers intrigued him.
So, in the late 1970s when he attended a two-day seminar at Muresk Institute which included a brief session on computer programming and a demonstration of a British dairy management system on an Apple II computer, Mr Egerton-Warburton admits "I was gone".
He bought an Osborne I personal computer, cut the legs down on his developing table and turned a photographic darkroom on the farm into his computer room.
The Osbourne was "about the size of a sewing machine and weighed about the same", Mr Egerton-Warburton said.
"It had 64 kilobytes of memory, two 5.25 inch (133 millimetres) floppy disc drives and a five inch (127 millimetre) screen where you got 52 small characters per line and 24 lines on the screen," he said.
Fortuitously, for about $2600 for the computer, Mr Egerton-Warburton also got a version of the programming language Basic which he taught himself to use.
"I added a dot-matrix printer for another $1100," he said.
While running the farm during the day, he set about writing a program for Korellup after dinner each evening which would replicate the budget comparison report he received from the Farm Management Service laboratory.
By 1981 he had succeeded and was using his own program - the first version dealt only with dollars, so cents had to be rounded up or down - to keep track of Korellup's financial performance, when he became aware Alan Moir was attempting to do the same thing.
"I rang Alan up and said 'I've got something to show you' so he came down and had a look and decided that rather than develop his own version, he'd take on the distributorship of mine," Mr Egerton-Warburton said.
That relationship lasted until 2000, when introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) required a major redevelopment of the Agrimaster program and his daughter-in-law Natalie - who had been retrenched from her job at a local bank - took on a role to teach farmers how to use the then current Agrimaster version and ultimately she and David formed Mastergroup to distribute it.
The first Agrimaster sales targets were the farmers supplying information to the Farm Management Service laboratory.
Mr Egerton-Warburton consulted widely on his program to find out what farmers wanted from it and what information accountants and farm management consultants required to complete taxation returns for clients.
Peter Falconer and John Abbie, Planfarm, and consultant Bob Hall, Bob Hall & Associates, used Agrimaster and their feedback influenced many of the features of subsequent versions of the program.
"It was to my advantage that I wasn't trained in computer programming," Mr Egerton-Warburton said.
"I didn't know what supposedly couldn't be done, to me it was just another problem to try to solve.
"But the thing that drew farmers to it (Agrimaster) was that it was written for farmers, it used terms they were familiar with and called things what they called them, rather than using terms that accountants used."
He wrote an improved Agrimaster II version while on holiday in Busselton in January 1984, with provision for dollars and cents cashbook entry and simple worksheets added to the budgeting module.
"We had a house at Busselton where we used to spend our summer holiday on the beach for a month every year and I wrote version two there half a day a week while on holiday," he said.
Subsequent versions of Agrimaster benefitted from more sophisticated versions of Basic, as well as processing speed, available memory and bigger screens - 80 characters instead of 52 at one stage.
Version three required a major rewrite of the previous programs and Mr Egerton-Warburton estimated it was going to take the best part of a year working full time on it.
"We asked a farm management consultant how we could run the farm and work full time on computer programming and he said 'simple, don't put the rams in' so that is what we did for 1989.
"We had a whole farm full of dry sheep - there were no lambs, no lamb marking, there was no work," Mr Egerton-Warburton said.
"I worked on programming five days a week and apart from shearing and a few other jobs, Mary and I did what farm work there was on the weekends.
"It turned out to be our best year, our most profitable year and a magnificent season to boot."
The new version from 1990 offered a more sophisticated interface and better budget worksheets and was very successful, but introduction of Microsoft Windows 3 with graphical user interface and a mouse, presented a major challenge again for Agrimaster 4 which was launched in late 1996.
"Both the operating system and the programming language, Visual Basic, were very different to the way I had learnt to develop applications, so it was off to school for several weeks to see if I could make the change," Mr Egerton-Warburton said.
"By this time both David and (younger son who still runs Korellup) Robert were both home from their education, so it was decided that they would run the physical side of the farm, Mary would run the administration and I would be a full-time software developer.
"In order to move to the new program, farmers had to buy a new computer, learn how to use a graphical interface and mouse and also navigate a program which took some time to get working well."
For the first time data from a previous version of Agrimaster could be imported and the budgeting module allowed entries to multiple bank accounts and sophisticated worksheets.
The cashbook introduced downloading statements from major banks, exporting data to accountant systems, printing cheques and entering and printing invoices.
Introduction of the GST on July 1, 2000, was "the single biggest booster of rural computer systems in the 20 years since their inception", according to Mr Egerton-Warburton.
"Suddenly you had farmers, who usually took a box of farm invoices, receipts and bank statements into their accountant once a year, having to report their financial situation to the taxation department every three months," he said.
At the same time, the then Australian Wheat Board changed its system of farmer payment which was made more complicated by the way it interacted with the GST.
"I had previous experience with the GST when I developed a version of Agrimaster II for the New Zealand market," Mr Egerton-Warburton said.
"I understood the concept and cut it down to what the farmers needed to know.
"We released the first GST version of Agrimaster 4 in early 2000 - six months before the GST came in and ahead of our competitors - so it was ready for the main budgeting season for grain growers in the post-harvest period of January and February.
"The cashbook and budgeting systems calculated all GST, bank interest and diesel fuel rebates.
"This was important as it left users with just the normal job of entering ex-GST data - the program handled everything else.
"The comprehensive reporting system gave users, accountants, consultants, bankers and even the ATO (Australian Tax Office), confidence that the system was adequate and accurate."
Mr Egerton-Warburton paid tribute to accountants John Stopher and Bob Bright who were involved with much of the GST error checking, exporting to accountant systems and bank statement importing modules and who also recommended Agrimaster to their clients.
Also David Neve, a consultant with Bird Cameron at that time, who was "a valuable sounding board" in discussions about the GST.
A module to import wheat income data into the cashbook from AWB, which automated the complicated interaction between the GST and the new wheat loan regime, a grain income calculator which did the same thing for the full budget and a module to import payroll data from WageEasy were the last Agrimaster elements programmed by Mr Egerton-Warburton and the most complex of the GST version.
"The story of Agrimaster and Mastergroup from the early 2000s to the present belongs to David and Natalie and it is due to their considerable efforts and talents that it has become the commercial success it is today," he said.
These days, Mr Egerton-Warburton and Mary live near the Royal Agricultural Society of WA showgrounds in Claremont and his computer skills are used on a voluntary basis to benefit the local Rotary club and Dalkeith Nedlands Bowling Club.
Of his legacy as a computer programmer with an OAM who provided a service for farmers, he said: "I'm not sure I ever made any money out of it.
"It was just something that interested me and we kept on going as technology improved."
