IT was during a typically chaotic harvest last December that Ryan Skamp, a young farmer in his mid-20s, was struck by an idea - an app that upon receiving the layout of a user's farm could produce a route that would reduce machine hours, carbon emissions, and increase efficiency.
Subscribe now for unlimited access to all our agricultural news
across the nation
or signup to continue reading
"I thought, if no one else will do it, why can't I develop something like that?" Mr Skamp said.
As it was little more than a musing at that stage, he approached his old buddy, Lachie Ross, a software engineer, asking if the idea could be a viable prospect.
"I didn't really understand how it could be done; I was aware that what I was asking to do was a bunch of mathematical equations," he said.
"But Lachie instantly backed it up with, 'this is exactly what AI is going to be used for'.
"It was within the first conversation that Lachie and I had, that I was sure AI was going to be a huge part of it."
Skan was agreed on as the name for the product, and Mr Skamp and Mr Ross pursued their idea.
It was the formation of a natural partnership.
"Lachie is very technically minded and structured in his work, and I'm the ideas man," Mr Skamp said.
As it is early days for Skan, there is still a ways to go until it will be a fully realised product.
"We're not at application yet, we're still a web based program; at the moment, we're what's called a minimum viable product," he said.
A minimum viable product (MVP) is when a product is in its rudimentary stages with a small amount of features, but is substantial enough to be used by a small number of customers.
Mr Skamp explained to Farm Weekly how Skan currently operates.
"People can upload their mapping files and we apply an efficiency algorithm to it, which scans the shape and size of your paddock, finds the most efficient way to travel the paddock, and we email it back to you," he said.
"At the moment it's clunky and it takes a lot of man hours.
"But with further development we can take all the clogs out of it and get it to where we want, which is an app on an iPad or an Android device and people can select their paddock from google images, and it'll come up with the most efficient way to work it, and you'll be able to have that live on your tractor.
"By the end of the year, we really want to have our basic product, which is on a mapping service where you deal with a single machine in terms of route optimisation and route efficiency."
At this stage of development, they are directing a lot of their energy to getting users on board with their vision.
"We're offering Skan Unlimited, which is a one-off payment where people get lifetime access to our program," Mr Skamp said.
"We're trying to tell people that we want to kick big goals, here."
Even in the midst of putting Skan's building blocks in order, Mr Skamp is keeping one eye on the future.
"We really just want to optimise efficiency on farms and that might lead to things we haven't even thought of yet," he said.
"We definitely don't want to stop with just a single optimisation thing - we really want to push this because there's nobody that's really doing it and I think a lot of farms can save a lot of money if they do things a bit more efficiently."
