In the red centre of Western Australia, Jack and Jasmine Carmody and their three young daughters are modern-day pioneers.
Channelling the spirit of a farming enterprise that goes back six generations of the Carmody family, they have been quick and early adopters of new technology - in its entirety - unlike anyone else in the State.
Remote monitoring, self-mustering water points, electronic (eID) tags, automated drafting races, satellite connectivity and Google enabled gates - they are harnessing anything available to them, combined with their family experience in broadacre cropping, precision agriculture and mining - to put Prenti Downs station, at Wiluna, on the cutting edge.
And they are not done yet.
They have a carbon sequestration project underway and are part of the Bullseye 2000 beef project.
The couple have this year begun a pilot program to develop a market for the region's huge population of camels and hope to build a practical training scheme with the local indigenous community.
They are also trying to get government support for a second pilot to regenerate the fragile rangelands pastures.
Mr Carmody is a Shire of Laverton councillor, who in March was part of a delegation who met the Prime Minister and opposition leader in Canberra to talk about community priorities.
And this year he started his YouTube channel Jack_Out_The_Back, which is becoming an increasingly popular educator about life on the land.
"Our whole ethos is sustainability - it has to be good for business and good for the environment,'' Mr Carmody said.
"Prenti Downs aims to achieve better land management through the use of technology and alternate livestock mustering processes.
"We have focused on doing the simple things well - which is largely managing the water."
The 3835 square kilometre Prenti Downs station is massive and about as remote as you can get.
About equivalent in size to Luxembourg, it is 257 kilometres east of Wiluna and 237km north of Laverton, surrounding lakes Carnegie and Wells.
The driveway is 180km and their closest neighbours at Carnegie and Windidda stations are each more than an hour's drive away.
The Carmodys have been managing the station since the family business, Cross Range, bought it in March 2015.
It had been on the market for two years and was carrying about 4000 Shorthorn cattle.
And - as it turned out - tens of thousands of kangaroos and feral animals.
Prenti Downs now has a carrying capacity of 3003 cattle units, or about 100 hectares per cattle unit, and turns off 800-1000 head a year, destined for pastures at Cascade and then the international market.
The Carmodys - Jack's parents Tim and Louise, older brothers Tom and George and Tom's partner Andrea - also own and run the 3600ha livestock and broadacre cropping and backgrounding operation, Clare Downs, at Cascade, about 100km north west of Esperance.
The family partnership means Prenti Downs and Clare Downs can happily co-exist.
The Carmodys regularly lend each other a hand at busy times such as seeding, harvest and mustering. Skilled farm workers from Clare Downs will do shifts on Prenti and machinery is often shuttled between the two operations.
"Our staff understand the whole production system, because they have got the cropping and some livestock, pastures and the backgrounding lot at Esperance and then they come up to the station to see where the cattle come from,'' Mr Carmody said.
And having regular extras for short stints helps everyone on Prenti Downs deal with their extreme isolation.
"It has helped with the mental health of all the employees,'' Ms Carmody said.
The first farming generation of Carmodys took up land at York, and each subsequent generation has moved - from Wagin, to Kulin, to clear the land at Esperance and then up north.
"The family, going back to granddad's day, had been involved in pastoral in some respect,'' Jack said.
"They had a feedlot in Wagin and they would buy cattle from stations, fatten them up and onsell them."
Tom, George and Jack spent their early childhoods at Clare Downs - but moved to Perth when Jack was about 10, as Tim and Louise developed their mining interests and the boys went to school.
But all their holidays were spent back on the farm, heading north on family roadtrips or to mining sites his parents were involved with.
Or they were touring mining and agricultural operations overseas, particularly in Zimbabwe and Zambia.
The boys all did work experience on farms in Zimbabwe.
"We were always looking at agriculture in other countries, particularly Zimbabwe, it has been there all the way through,'' Jack said.
"We had exposure to a lot of different stuff growing up - tobacco, game farming, pigs, ducks, cropping, such as maize, irrigation and even biofuels.
"My brother and I got a very cool tour of the Zimbabwe ethanol industry - they were laser levelling the country for cane fields, all for fuel production.
"It is one of the world's largest operations and it was insane to see it.''
On their holidays up north, Tim and Louise would often consider the possibility of moving into the pastoral industry.
Then, in the early 1990s, the family lived at Tennant Creek for a few months while Tim commissioned and then later shut down a mine site, and they realised the huge untapped potential of harvesting the feral cattle endemic to the outback.
So, it was no great leap to buy Prenti Downs.
The high-tech strategy they quickly employed was also no accident.
From the moment they bought the station, the family began to draw on their collective decades of experience.
"Tim and Louise have come from an international corporate mining as well as a strong generation farming background and they came straight onto the station and said 'how can we improve the efficiencies?','' Ms Carmody said.
Mr Carmody said they followed the same scope they had used to expand their broadacre cropping operation, which adopted autosteer, section control and variable rate technology to increase productivity.
Mr Carmody also brings an impressive range of personal skills and Jack-of-all-trades handiness, as country people do, which makes him self-sufficient.
He gained a strong base in electronics at Mazenod College, where he was encouraged by a committed and enthusiastic electronics teacher.
After school, he began an agribusiness degree at Curtin University, but left to return to work for Tom at Clare Downs for a while, before becoming a precision ag specialist with Greenline Ag and then Haeusler Farm Supplies.
From there, he joined Cervus Equipment at Ballarat, in Victoria, working on online and new technologies, particularly for John Deere products.
This gave him further working chops in precision agriculture and mechanics.
A pilot's licence, achieved in 2013, now means the 3.5 days a week that he would have spent travelling the station to attend to water points, can instead be managed in 3.5 hours.
To boot, he is a self-taught apiarist.
From the hand-over of Prenti Downs, Mr Carmody said the family geared up and went in with a plan.
"We knew we were going to change the way it was done from everything we had learned from everywhere around the world, in particular, at Alcoota station, Northern Territory, which had been using self-mustering yards since the 1980s,'' he said.
The first priority was to develop Prenti Downs' 36 water points.
"When we looked at Prenti we said 'lets do self-mustering yards' and lets control the water from front to back,'' Mr Carmody said.
"In the first three months, we put self-mustering yards around every water point."
They have spent about $150,000 so far on the connectivity solutions, including the cost of Jack-hours, setting up the yards, with a spear gate entrance and a voice-activated, automated exit gate which can be operated via a domestic Google Display.
The yards are permanent, but not fixed to the ground, which means they will shift if pushed.
They were ready for their first muster, within six months of taking over the station.
"I liken the yards to a fishing net,'' Mr Carmody said.
"A camel or a feral horse that wants a drink has a lot of power.
"When the yards aren't fixed to the ground, if any feral animal pushes on the yards panel, they can't break the yards.
"This whole yard just shifts around and they can never get to the water.''
Remote surveillance has been set up on most of the water points, offering a clear view of the yard, trough and water tank.
Mr Carmody is hoping to complete the project by this summer.
"Camels partricularly drink at night, when people aren't around,'' he said.
It means their visits to a water trough could easily be missed, but 24/7 monitoring lets Jack check when and where camels and wild horses are about.
Remote monitoring also picks up the floating dipsticks on the water tanks, which show if the tanks aren't filling the troughs properly.
The whole system has minimal ongoing costs and means Tim, Tom and George can also help keep an eye on the water points from anywhere.
Windmills were dropped and each replaced with solar-powered, electric submersible pumps, with remote video monitoring and Wi-Fi, which has eliminated leaks and overflows.
They made a yield map - which is also one of the first tasks in cropping - which helps them work out where to spend money or further increase efficiencies.
They were able to identify which of the water points could manage a higher stocking rate - given they are so spread out, the cattle don't move from one to another.
"Then we went vari-rate with our stocking numbers,'' Mr Carmody said.
"Compared to the traditional catch-all method, where you round everything up, and walk them for 30-40km, we know where they came from.
"That is taking that broadacre dollars per hectare into consideration.''
As a result, when young cattle go into backgrounding at Cascade, the Carmodys know which water point the fastest or slowest developers come from, and they can alter stocking densities or target supplementary feeding back on the station only where it is required.
They also moved quickly to tackle a huge feral animal problem.
In the first six months, they shot 636 horses that were on the property and have since removed 8500 camels, 700 donkeys and 4000 horses.
Kangaroo numbers are also huge.
"Over-grazing was one of the issues identified on the property,'' Mr Carmody said.
"We have removed more feral animals, than all the official reports estimated were there.''
In the absence of any mobile phone connection, the Carmodys built Wi-Fi connectivity across the station - first with the nbn Co, and now using the cheaper and faster StarLink satellite network.
Mr Carmody has set up eight repeater stations on high points, with plans for four more.
There's also a StarLink unit on his ute.
"Without the nbn, we would not be where we are, because it allowed us to start and to then push it to the next level,'' he said.
"They have helped us make connections and connected us to the world.
"It has been incredible.''
Their innovative efforts earned Prenti Downs a place as a finalist in the #innovatewithnbn2022 awards last year and the nbn network remains as a back-up should the satellite network be disrupted.
For station work, they have a couple of repurposed, Mad Max-style, ex-military workhorses, which Tim and Tom drove across the Nullarbor from Melbourne.
But wherever possible, maintenance and monitoring work has moved to the air.
Mr Carmody flies a two-seater plane and landing strips have been built "everywhere''.
"We investigated all the monitoring solutions that were commercially available, but it was still cheaper to have an aeroplane,'' he said.
"And we have home-made alternatives to all the monitoring solutions that were on the market at the time, because we could.''
A self-adapted, transportable drafting race can be moved across the station to any of the yards.
The implementation of eID tags is a big and ongoing task, which they are managing when they are able.
Put together, it could ultimately create a low-stress, minimal-intervention drafting system which could do the work for them, or provide remote diagnostics, with disciplined, well trained cattle moving automatically though Google-sprung gates with an alert from an eID reader promoting any husbandry investigation or action that might be required.
"It will take the livestock game to the next level,'' Mr Carmody said.
As well as freeing up capital, time and energy, and improving workplace safety, the changes have also seen the country regenerate.
The fragile, ankle-high saltbush country they started with is now waist-high and grasses are growing well in the yards - all despite a big dry season.
The couple's latest, yet unrealised business plan, is to build a viable business utilising the hundreds of tonnes a year of camel meat that comes through the property and to provide a practical, hands-on training program for the local indigenous community.
Ms Carmody said Jack and his dad had identified early on that if cattle could be managed with self-mustering yards, then so could camels and horses.
It would also offer a low-pressure, low-risk environment in which to train a local indigenous workforce to process the meat.
They are in the early days of working with an Albany-based pet meat supplier but a few significant hurdles remain.
"From the first six months, we have been advocating strongly for a positive industry for the camel meat,'' Mr Carmody said.
"There is an opportunity for skills development there, while creating a positive, non-extraction based industry for the region, that is sustainable because we have free range camels.
"Those processing skills are perfectly transferable."
Ms Carmody said without reasonable access to a viable market and a big enough abattoir, the meat was being wasted.
"We are the first people to stand up and say we wish it was different, we wish there was more we could do with the large feral animals,'' Ms Carmody said.
They are also working with their indigenous neighbours at Windidda station to help them set up eight self-mustering watering points and bring its pastoral operation into the digital monitoring world.
"It is fantastic to see traditional owners have identified that this makes sense for land management and looking after this country, and this is the way they want to do it themselves,'' Mr Carmody said.
Their plans for a hands-on, practical training scheme could develop local indigenous rangers and machinery operators.
While there has been plenty of success on Prenti Downs so far, Mr Carmody acknowledges the journey hasn't come without mistakes and not all their money was well spent.
But the pair has been frustrated by government red tape which prevents best-level feral animal control, regular pushback from bureaucrats running some rangelands projects and their limited access to grants due to being such early adopters.
"There is an international market for the camel meat but the red tape is prohibiting us from entering it,'' Jack said.
"And we feel some open bitterness... the pastoral departments are promoting the adoption of things which we saw 30 and 40 years ago."
Despite these hurdles, Prenti Downs is above all a home and a lifestyle for the Carmodys who want to promote and share their pastoral life with the world.
Their girls are growing up with freedom, blue skies and clear air - and have the robust confidence of a country upbringing.
A former primary school teacher, who is involved in the Isolated Children's Parents' Association and Kalgoorlie School of the Air, Ms Carmody oversees their classes, as well as getting stuck in on an equal footing with the farming and business tasks.
And as everything on Prenti Downs has a name, they have built their own storyline.
Favourites include Ebay - a water point - because everything for it was purchased on ebay and Dino, a 1985 LandCruiser "dinosaur", which was modified to run on bio fuels.
It runs through the farm - using a language that resonates with them and can be handed down through the family's next generations.
"When we call a water point by a name it is because it has got a story and it is easier for us to remember how to get to the water point or remember the significance of the water point because of the story,'' Mr Carmody said.
"How much of a culturally ingrained thing is that?"
Friendly Carmody family rivalry leads to popular YouTube channel...
If you haven't seen it already, then check out Jack Carmody's Jack_Out_The_Back YouTube channel, which he's got into in a big way this year to compete with his cousin John Carmody.
John posted his first video when then two branches of the family finished their last harvest together at Tom's Brook Farm, at Cascades, in 2011.
They filmed the harvest and then edited a video "on a Macbook over a few beers"... posted it on John's YouTube channel and it was well received.
Fast forward 10 years, John's English farm worker George Summers mentioned that people would be interested in what they did, so John started posting again.
George soon visited Prenti.
"YouTube has gone from being competitive, to education to information,'' Jack said.
"In one way, it is almost an investment pitch - let's invest in our country and future and build it up.
"Let's look at what we can do for people.''
Jack_Out_The_Back has 3940 subscribers and Jack's vidoes regularly have 3000-5000 views, over at Tom Brook's Farm, John is is up to 6670 YouTube subscribers and 603 Twitter followers..
"We figure we are controlling the narrative and are the ones putting the video out there instead of it being a spy or plant, who is looking to show you only the narrative they believe in,'' Jack said.
"And we do try, we are working with something that is very dynamic and is more than an Excel spreadsheet."
The platforms are a bit of fun, but also offer these next generation farmers a louder voice in the agricultural space.
"For us it became about education and sharing our story,'' Jasmine said.
"We want to make people see that farmers do actually care for their livestock and the environment."
Jack said they had found broadacre farmers were very supportive of each other, because they were together competing against global markets and the "fellows over east".
"We want to do the same here,'' Jack said.
"If our pastoral neighbours are doing well it is better for us.
"The more we can share and lift everyone else's abilities and standards, it helps us stop the bad press and makes it easier and less cost-prohibitive to manage the stations.''
Jack said as more people, especially non-farmers, saw the channel, they were understanding that the cattle where in the most natural environment they could be in.
"They are in such a low-stress environment, they are out free and roaming, and they deal with humans in a positive manner,'' Jack said.
And they had found YouTube was also a two-way street.
The Carmodys get plenty of comments back from communications and other specialists around the world, eager to share their skills, ideas and suggestions.
Retirees are a particular favourite.
"I've always said the most valuable asset to pastoralisms and farming are non-pastoralists and non-farmers because they will come in with a different lens, they will look at it in a different way and make suggestions from another industry,''Jack said.
"And we are willing to change and try different things.''
