Take that challenge. Nut it out. Really a bit of persistence, a bit of support from someone else to get some ideas on how to fix that. Discs in wet conditions. What are other people doing to get through those wet conditions? How do they do that? Can I keep climbing that ladder rather than starting back from scratch? Because as we climb that ladder, we're getting our yields are improving. We're getting way better soil health. It's better for our bottom line.
We're getting way more sustainable farms.
Hello and welcome back to Shared Ag Solutions by BCG. I'm Janine Batters. And today we're going to be speaking with Tim Rethus for our first episode of our new series On the Horizon Farm Tech. And we thought we'd start this one just by discussing with Tim some of the things that he does on his farm, whether he actually adopts a new technology and whether he keeps it too. So Tim has got a lot of new tech on his farm, and I'm just so excited. Tim, thanks so much for being here today.
Thanks, Jeanine. I always love new tech and it's great that you're doing the podcast. It's gonna be really interesting, I think.
I'm so excited. I'm excited to have Tim, because I do ring you a little bit about things, and he's always sort of my one of my go to people to to find out if I'm not understanding something or if I want something new. So I really wanted to share your knowledge with our listeners. So just really quickly, Tim, I think a lot of people would know you from social media, but if they don't, can you just give a quick background on yourself and your farm?
Our main farm is at Horsham, so we're in the Wimmera, which is a rain fed farming system. About 300 mms of rain falls over winter, which is when we grow our crops, but there's only about 100 over summer. It's quite variable, so it's too hot and dry to grow crops over summer. So we do a really big range
of crops because our soil types are quite good. It's considered probably some of the better cropping soils in Australia so we can grow canola, wheat, barley, lentils, field peas, chickpeas, faba beans, oaten hay vetch pretty much anything that you can grow over winter. We can grow really well, but yeah, not irrigated .
How long have you been farming?
My grandpa's been there since just after the war. So 40s. And so that's what, 77 years or something so far. Third generation at the moment.
And have you always been a farmer, Tim?
No, I haven't. Dad was quite insistent that we follow our own paths. And so all us kids went to uni, four kids. We went to uni and did different things. One's an accountant, one's a microbiologist, one did telecommunications engineering and I did chemical engineering. And I worked at Shell Oil Company for 11 years before coming back to the farm.
There you go. So we'll jump in. Maybe we should talk about just just some of the farm tech that you've got on your farm.
I think it goes through different phases. And so I think one of the things to know first up is that my brother and I are both engineers. He's telecommunications. And he came back to the farm a year after I did. I'm a chemical engineer and engineering, the key thing that they do is they just solve problems. And so when we came to AG back to the farm, it was like, okay, it's just solving problems. The same thing that we do at work, at our old jobs. So
we're really keen to try new things. We're in that phase. We figure that anything that they can throw at us with this new tech, we probably have a pretty good chance of trying to get a good handle on it. So we're pretty excited to try a lot of these new things and provide good feedback. So we do have probably a high preponderance of new initiatives going on. Not all of them are successful, but it's always good fun. If we go to spraying, we have we've had PWM spraying.
Dad's been quite an innovator. Pulse width modulation and turn compensation we've had on our sprayer for quite some time. We've incorporated camera spraying with AI. So green on green and green on brown spraying. We do variable applications with the sprayer, which a lot of people can do. Now we've got a big network of weather stations on our farm that we measure soil moisture with, which we then use to actually do yield predictions and then help that
inform nitrogen applications. We do a lot of imagery. We've got satellite images coming in. We've been doing yield maps since the 90s. Not all of these things are used that well, but we do collect them. We figure they're very important. We're doing a lot of grid sampling and trying to use that to inform our management zones. And
so we're still building in that area. Played around with Taranis Ag, which was a really interesting tool where they used drones to do submillimeter resolution imagery across your field and then count insects and count disease spots and plant numbers. That's cool. That is pretty cool. Unfortunately, it's expensive, so don't do that anymore. But it would be cool to do it again. Yeah. Control traffic on our farm. So that's an important thing.
And we have inter-row sowing. And we do a lot of things with tracks to reduce our compaction and use VF tires. We do control traffic haymaking, which has taken a long time to get to where it is now, but we're sort of pretty comfortable with how our control traffic works.
How do you do that?
How do you do that? Well, it's just it's a slow Every time we buy a new piece of gear for our hay gear stuff, we work towards it. But we've managed to get a system where we cut three. We use three mowers to cut on one tractor. So our front mower and two back mowers, we can cut 40ft or 12m, and then we can use our rake and our tedder to spread the crop. And then we can rake it back into one 40 foot windrow 12 meter windrow.
And then we can bale it. And then we have a stacker that we can use to pick up off tramlines and take the bales. These are big squares back to the end and then truck them out for export. So yeah, that.
Is pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah. What are VF tyres?
Very flexion tyres. It just means they bulge a lot, and it means they can carry more weight. So they can carry about 40% more weight for the same tyre pressure as conventional tyres. So what that means is you can run lower tyre pressures with the tyre. So if you run a like on our sprayer, we run a 480 wide tire, 480 mm wide tyre. You can drop the pressure down to under a bar in it, which
is really good because that spreads. Instead of spreading the tyre out wide with duals, you spread it out long by bulging and making the footprint longer. So it's like a track, but it's a tyre kind of thing. So yeah, it's just a way of trying to manage our tramlines, because when you do CTF, you create these tramlines to run on every year, repeating them every year. But because you're driving on them a lot, you've got to do
road maintenance. If you can use tyres, like with the trucks on the road, you know, more axles, spreads the load, protects the roads better. Same with the farm. You know you're using tracks or you're using VF tyres to try and spread the load and protect those tracks for longer. So you have to do less maintenance on them.
Yeah, there's been a lot of wheel track renovating going on.
These wet conditions have been terrible for it. Yeah, really really painful. We've got a disc seeder. We've got a disc seeders a bit novel. We used to have a single disc and we went. We tried a precision planter, like a corn planter, which was kind of cool, but it can't. So, uh, crops like oats. So we had to have two machines that seemed a bit excessive. So we invested in one big one, and we sort of got an 80 foot. So a 24 metre, um, twin
disc seeder. So two discs together, um, it's got individual downforce control and it can do inter-row sowing with its own GPS on the machine to guide between the rows. We have a liquid system on that to do our secret herbs and spices we were talking about earlier for our fertilizer. Yeah. And then also with harvesting, you know, we play around with harvesting and a lot of harvesters have GPS control on them now. And they've got management of the engine and engine load. So to get more
efficiency out of the machine. And also they've got cameras inside to look at the grain quality and then self-adjust the harvester on the go. So the cool thing with the new harvesters is they're becoming more and more automated. So they're incrementally creeping towards automation. You still have to have a supervisor. I like to think of it as a as the person on the pool guy that sits in the chair watching the people swimming in the pool.
That's kind of where the farm is getting to. The machine should do everything, but if something really bad happens, you're there to jump in and save the day or help set it up or tell people the rules. So you need to be there to have that influence on, oh, there's a pile of dirt there that the machine didn't anticipate being there, and now it's having a problem, or it threw a belt or something like that. So maintenance problem so.
So farmers can feel like the hero.
We can feel like a hero. But at the same time we can spend way more time on Twitter and things like that.
The important things.
Yeah, yeah.
That sounds really cool. What else? You've got a few more things.
Uh, yeah. With the machine. We've also been playing around with protein meters, so probably I know you're going to do a session with John Dyer in the future, which will be great. He's way more experienced at it than me. But but yeah, using protein meters to actually A, work towards profitability maps. So that's what we really care about as farmers.
How much money are we making per hectare, and is this the best way to make money that out of that hectare, are we spending too much or too little and also using it to inform our nitrogen decisions the following year? So in our system I found it's tricky. So in some systems like say Western Australia where they're very high preponderance of canola and wheat, both of those are nitrogen consumers. So you can use the previous year's map to inform the next year because it's probably a
similar nitrogen consumer. But with ours, we'll flip to a legume or something, and then the legume fixes its own nitrogen, and that can also make it more challenging. So still working through stuff, but it's really great to have people like in Western Australia that are working quite strongly, or John, who's got a big thing on that with his durum to actually get those insights and then try and apply them back to your farm.
It's exciting, isn't it? Farmers sharing solutions. Everyone's trying different things. And yeah.
There's always an expert in a field somewhere, and it's just a matter of trying to work out how that would work in your area and whether it would work, and whether it be useful in your farming system.
I love it, I love it. I think we could have a podcast probably talking to you on each of these things. I'm just thinking about that, that seeder of yours. I'm like, I've got so many questions, but I better not. We might get stuck, we might save it. So what we wanted to focus on for this podcast was so in leading into some of the new technologies that we're going to be talking about, how do you know whether you're going to take on a new technology Tim? What do you do?
I always look at it as we're always on the look for new things, and it doesn't have to be some fancy high tech digital solution. It just needs to be something that's solving a problem I've got on the farm. And so when you're out there in the Harvester and you've got more time because it's automated, you're looking at it and going, why is that area doing that? What
can I do to fix that? And you might have a great idea, oh, I wish I had a protein meter because then I could actually get quality data, and then I could actually make a decision of whether I'm overspending or not, and to have that tool there. But then at the same point, what was available at the time was like, oh, it's not really what I wanted. And for us, we're playing around with the John Deere Harvest Lab, which is essentially the second type of protein
meter you can get. There's the crop Scan's been available for a long time, but we found the John Deere one integrates really well with our equipment. And all the layers come together. And they all play friends quite quickly and easily. And I can look at them on, on the go as we're harvesting. So you look at it and go, oh, there's my solution. And then I start working and chipping towards that goal, which is I want
that full per hectare based profitability and performance. So I want to know is that hectare doing the best water use efficiency? Is it actually hitting its yield potential for whatever reason? Is it got a problem with soil constraints that I can track down. So that's where I'm getting to. But I'm not there yet. But we're just slowly chipping away at these things and you know where you want to go. And so you then use these things to
try and work towards it. And sometimes it's not a silver bullet, you know, it's rarely that you're going to buy a new piece of equipment that's going to solve your problem in one hit. It's usually it's like going to get you maybe 70 or 80% of the way there. And then the other 20% is your innovation. Or maybe it's get something better next time.
So what I'm hearing is that for each hectare that you have, you also you have a strategy. So do you have a strategy or do you have some principles for your farm that you use to help you make those decisions?
I think that's the key thing, isn't it? It's about having some visions on where you want your farm in the future and how you want it to look, and every farm is going to be slightly different, but I'll go through my top five, maximize profitability per hectare. So we get all these maps that are based on whole fields. But I want to go down smaller. We've got bigger fields.
We've pulled fences out to make things more efficient with our big gear, but we have to use what we used to use in corporate world, you know, think local, act global. We're acting global. We've got big paddocks, but we've got to go back to what the old timers did, which is look at each paddock on its merits. And they put fences down, fencing out soil types and stuff like that. We've got to get that back into our
system using variable rate applications and stuff like that. So I want to make sure each piece of land I've got, because it's getting so expensive now, is performing at its best. So that's number one. Then the other one is if I have healthy soils, I'll get healthy crops. So if I can get my soil health right. So that means thinking about stubble retention, conserving moisture, trying to trap as much of that limited moisture we get in the soil is going to give me the most yield. So water
equals yield. Very important timeliness. This is also part of soil health as well. The best farmers as we're told. Kate Burke will tell you this endlessly. Get things done on time. One of the great things with good soil health, good healthy plants, because the soil is healthy is they give you that little bit wider window. So they're a little bit they take a little bit less time to get infected with the disease. And that means you've got more time to get in on time to treat them
and manage with it. So getting things done on time and that might mean bigger gear, it might just mean better monitoring. So you know when to get out there or not. The other one we have is is weeds. We're in a no till system. So weeds can be a problem. We don't burn very often. We don't cultivate very often. And so we end up with a lot of weed banks, and we're reliant on our herbicides to do most of the work. We don't have any stock.
So if you're going to be dealing with that, we've got to look for opportunities to get rid of those weeds at every time to run them down. So that'll be things like spray topping might be windrowing , spraying under windrow Carter bars, diverse rotations in your herbicides, things like that. A lot of farmers are doing that anyway. And then the other thing is looking for efficiencies. So labor's getting hard. So we're always looking for how we can do more with less workers just because it's really
hard to get good ones and also too, inputs. So we want to reduce our inputs. Can we use less fertilizer. Or maybe we need to use more to get the better result in another area. Can I use less herbicides but not being just setting targets to reduce those, it's about can I be more efficient with them because that's going to save me money anyway. So it's in my best interest. So it's about that long term sustainability. But yeah keeping that money per hectare is the key number for me.
Do you find, though, that your principles change depending on what the technology is that you want. Ah.
Can can I mean the thing is that sometimes you're just doing stuff because you're really excited about it. I mean, the classic is drones, right? We don't use drones much other than maybe taking some harvest footage for a video for for looking at it later on. But, you know, other people are mad keen on them. And that's because when somebody has a real passion for it, they will find a way to justify it. That's the classic I can think of is the self-propelled sprayer versus the tow
behind sprayer debate. Some farmers will argue that a self-propelled sprayer is completely unnecessary, and a tow behind sprayer is by far the best because that's what they've got. And then another farmer will be like trying to justify a self-propelled sprayer. And you can tell by the time that they're trying to justify it that they really just want one. And they'll they'll make a justification for it to happen when they get it, they'll be really happy with the result.
But often the numbers get massaged to suit what you think is right. So the key thing is to stick to your principles and make sure you're not just going, wow, I just love a gold Mercedes. And you go, well, how does that fit with your with your principles? You know, it doesn't really. It's just because you want one.
And having them written down, I suppose. So that would probably help you stick to them. Do you think? Do you have yours written down?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've done a few presentations before, so I kind of stuck with the same ones as I've gone through different presentations and found that they don't change very much. So yeah, I think you'll find they'll be pretty much the same all the time. Obviously it varies per condition, like if you're talking about a digital solution which is relatively cheap, versus like, I'm going to buy a new seat or a new harvester, that's a completely different set of things. But yeah.
Okay. So that was one thing. So make sure that if you're adopting a new technology, you would say, do they align with your farming principles? But I also heard you talking about your perception of change and how your problem solving is really important. Yeah.
That's right. So you're always looking for ways to make your life easier. Clearly. And normally farmers, if they're doing liquid blends they'll have hoses with cam locks, like, you know, self-releasing fittings everywhere and stuff goes everywhere. And you get all wet and it's cold because it's winter and they're sticky and you got to wear gloves and it's horrible.
So then, like, we've gone and spent all this money putting in this nice clean with flow meter mixing facility that's all piped and plumbed and closed and it's like, well, yeah, it might have cost a few dollars to do it, but my God, it made that job so much easier.
Is that the batching machine you're talking about?
This is our this is our liquid batching system. So when we do a liquid batching system for our sewing, and it's a terrible job that usually you have to do at 10:00 at night and it's cold and you don't want to be out there. And the seeder guy goes, I think you're going to be short. Can you go and get me some more? So making that job as simple and painless as possible so that the guy that's doing that tender truck, the grouper, can actually go and do it and go, oh, all right, fine. Only take
me 15 minutes. That's fine. But if you have to go out there for an hour and get wet at 10:00 at night, you're not so excited about it. And it just makes you frustrated and gets you annoyed with the seeder guy because he didn't tell you that earlier when you could have done it before tea before you
had a shower, you know, those sort of things. So those little things that just annoy you and tweak on you and that ends up with like, I know a bit of grading between people as well because it's like, ah, why didn't they plan ahead? Why it's not my problem and why am I dealing with this? So sometimes these little things can actually lead to bigger rewards that are
really less tangible. You know, like you talk about green on green spraying or just green on brown spraying where you're spraying weeds in a fallow and you go, okay, so why are you doing that? Oh, you're going to save 90%. That's what the claim is, 90% of the chemical consumption. And it's like, well, okay. But then you go and do it yourself and you find out it's not 90%, you might only be saving 70%, which is
still fantastic, but you're not saving what they think. So I guess there's perception and the reality and then there's the intrinsic benefits out of that. So for instance, in the camera spraying case, you're not filling up as often. Saves you heaps of time not filling up as often, even though you might only be spraying half as much and nowhere near what the manufacturer claimed you could do, it's still saving you a lot. And that gap of how much did the time save me can be very
hard to quantify. And so you did your business case based on saving 90% of chemical. In practice. You didn't get there, but there were these other benefits, but they're much harder to measure. So sometimes it's not quite so black and white piece of paper business case.
So that's probably where it's important to talk to people isn't it. And you talk be on social media and talk to your agents and that sort of thing I think.
So I think what I look at is, is pretty much if you think something's going to be viable, it probably will pay for itself and it might not be. It saves you $1 every year. It could be like a storage facility where you build it and you save $100. You gain $100 a ton every 10th year. That would be better than saving $1 every year. So it may not make you money every year. But there's one great year where it really pays off. So camera spraying is a very good example. You get no summer, summer rains.
You don't get any summer weeds. You didn't use it. So it's wasted. Right. But then the next year you used extensively used it 2 or 3 times on every field. Huge payoff. And so you got to average out of the long term. Make sure you get the benefit. And don't try and get money every year. So when you're doing your business case, it's not like, well, I'll save $32 on that one and I'll save $16 on that one.
It's like, well, the hope is that 80% of the time, you know, I need three cases to pay it off, or 80% of the time I'll get this, or what I like to do is you get the technology you think it should be break even, and then what can I do with it extra that will get me extra benefit. And that could be peace of mind. It could be de-stressed workers. It could be that you found a completely new use for it. So with the camera spraying, guys
got clever and we're using it for fungicide spraying. When we had the beans dying out with the disease a couple of years ago, you could go and spray fungicide on the remaining alive beans using the green on brown technology. No point spraying fungicide on a dead bean, but you could put the expensive stuff out on the stuff that was still living and keep it through to the finish. So you. And that was another application that is not
marketed with that. But you could, like you say, go through social media or find it from other people, some clever ways of getting extra value out of some of these technologies.
That's interesting. So you have your approach so problem solving have your key principles. And also looking for those ways that it might what you could make it work better for you. Like yeah.
It's the cream on top right. So yeah you've got your normal your normal solution. And then what can I add to it. Can I get a cherry on top with that somehow by getting an extra benefit that wasn't actually in the plan?
That's really smart. And I really like how you talked about the stressed workers and the I can completely relate to the, you know, oh, oh, we ran out and I need more of this. And oh, it's at 10:00 at night. And I really I think that would probably work profitability wise in terms of you might be able to get staff.
You can get staff, you have less mistakes. So you're not spending more time fixing things because somebody has, you know, been a bit annoyed and they've made a made an error dump some grain on the ground or something and then spent a while shoveling it up, you know, stuff like that. Like it's just wasted time.
I got cold, they got a cold because they got cold.
Yeah that's right, that's right, that's right. But then it makes it more pleasurable working. Working environment too. So if things are going well and also too like people will come up with some ideas, they'll be like, oh, I think we need to put a rubbish bin over next to this because I have to keep walking all the way over there to put, oh yeah, that's a good idea. Little tiny thing like that could make somebody very happy
and save a lot of effort. And then all of a sudden everyone's on the same page, every one's thinking about how can I improve things? How can I change things?
That's the approach, isn't it?
That's the approach. You want that innovative thing going in there and you want people to always be thinking about, don't, don't say I hate this. It's like, what could I do to make it better if you ever saw this, hey, I found this when I was at the field days. Uh, you know, the Wimmera machinery field days. This thing was there. We should. You should go and have a look at that. It was really cool. It'd be really good for this job that we do, which would make our lives so much easier.
And I also think that would help with your team, too, because they all feel like they've got a little bit of ownership, they all feel like they're involved and it it's sort of a good team environment.
I think with our group generally our team have quite specific roles. So like I do a spraying and harvesting. So I'm crop growing and harvesting and Luke does the marketing and a lot of the logistics. And then Glenn used to be our hay dog. He just loved hay.
So you know when it comes to doing anything with hay, you'd make sure that Glenn was cool with it before you went and made any purchases, or if there was any suggestions of things we could change, he'd be the one looking for them because he's the guy talking to other people that like hay. And he'd be like, oh, these other guys are using this. Maybe we should get one of those, you know, hey, that's a great idea, I love that.
So problem solving team approach. Yeah. What else. Anything else that you would recommend to farmers when they're thinking. Because I think sometimes it can be like, oh well it's all right for him, you know, or oh, we can't afford that. Or so what would you say to some of our listeners who are thinking, oh, but I just don't want to spend the money, Tim, or I'm not sure. I'm not sure about this tech. I think it could be good.
I think you end up selling it to yourself. But I think the key thing is the support that's got to be there, too. The support could be the dealer, for instance. You know, with the protein meter, you've got very good support with them guys. When we were playing around with that and they were very attentive and listening and trying. You're also trying to provide good feedback because they're invested in what you're doing as well. Because we talked about this, it's like because it's a new product
coming out, they're very keen for it to succeed. So if you come in with the right mentality of I'm trying to contribute to make this product success, then they will also be on board with you too. So provide good feedback. They will provide good support to help get that through. So when you're also looking at it from the tech point of view, it doesn't necessarily have to be the technician. That's the wizard. It could be just a farmer, you know, that does a really good job
at it. So like someone like Broden Holland or John Dyer that are really good at protein maps are the ones that you'd be trying to form a relationship and communicating with and asking a few questions about. And then when you go to talk to the tech, he may not be as up to date as those two guys even, but at least you can sort of speak the language and sort of ask some good questions about it as well.
The other thing I find that's really interesting with this technology too, is, is trying to understand where it's coming from and how it's trying to work. So a lot of the times like if you a classic is if you're buying a new car, you tend to go and test drive the car and you want a car that kind of feels like your old car but new. And it's like, well, that's not necessarily the best car. So if you're going to drive an EV, it's going to
drive completely different to your Mazda. You can't compare apples with apples. You've got to understand how that car wants to behave, and then try and use it in the way it was intended to be used before you make a decision that, oh, this is absolutely rubbish. So when you get a new technology, it's like, okay, so how is the interface supposed to work? How am I trying to use it? Am I just trying to push my opinion on it of what I've experienced before, onto it
and not letting it shine? And now I'm getting frustrated because it's not working the way because I didn't think about how it was.
So you said a very nice way of saying maybe it's sometimes the operator, sometimes it's you.
Yeah, sometimes it's you. That's exactly right. So make sure you try and use it. Because if you can do that all of a sudden unlocks how it was working. So you've got to almost get your mind of how the engineers intended it to go.
Anything else?
I think also, too, when you're looking at the technology, it's always an opportunity when you're purchasing something new. So if you're purchasing a new tractor, you're purchasing a new seat or a new harvester. Are there things I could potentially be throwing in here? If you buy a harvester and it cost you $1 million, adding an extra $5,000 for some upgrade is insignificant to the whole scheme of things, but it could be worth way more than $5,000 to you. And this is the 1 in 7 year purchase that
you do of a harvester. So is it where I need it to be in seven years? Is there anything I can do that's going to help? So when you look at these tools, it's always good to look at the options and what's available and just have a really good think about it before you make the decision. So you're making the decision based on fuel economy or horsepower or whatever. But what else is there that that machine could also deliver for you that might actually be beneficial
down the track that you haven't actually had before. So almost like maybe try 5% extra, try 5% new, something a bit different, just to try and tease it up. And maybe that'll make your thinking change as you start using that tool.
But now when everything. Tim, how do I decide what what I should start focusing on first?
Did you check your budget?
Yeah.
Well, that's the problem.
How do I.
How do I.
Know I've got a certain amount of budget, but I've got five things that I want.
I think you've got to look at your principles. Don't you got to go back to your principles. Which one is actually following my principles and which ones? Like following what the neighbors are doing, following what the guy on Twitter is doing, which ones actually, I think are going to deliver the biggest benefit for me and which is also the clearest benefit for me. So you've got green on green and I always get summer rain. I'm definitely going to get also green on brown. I'm always going
to get spraying with green on brown. It's going to be a big benefit to me, and I always get contractors in, and I spend $60,000 getting contractors in. I could pay for the system by not buying contractors in, you know, that sort of thing. So you're doing that and you can clearly see that's going to be a big win. So clearly you're going to go for that
one first. The one of I'm going to put an extra weather station in which might be cheaper, but it's not maybe going to be useful when there's another one a kilometer away. Maybe that would be the one you'd save on at the time. Like it just depends on where you're at. But I would always go back to see which one's going to give me the biggest bang for buck, or which is the most frustrating problem that
it's going to help me solve. And usually that's going to be the same bang for buck sort of solution.
That's a really good point. I think thinking about perhaps not what the neighbors doing, but perhaps it's good to know what the neighbor is doing. And you might you might do that. And it's great to get ideas. But thinking about how is this new technology going to work for me? How am I going to make it work for me on my farm?
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think you always need to go back and saying, is this following the neighbors are going to have different rules to you and different principles that they're working towards. So you've always got to be conscious of am I following my the way I'd like my farm to be in 25 years time?
Okay. So anything else in terms of what you would recommend to farmers that are thinking about applying new tech?
Oh, I mean, the other thing too is there's obviously a lot of father son or father daughter farms. I mean, maybe this is an opportunity to give it to the younger guy and say, or the younger girl and say, look, we're going to get this thing out and we're going to get protein metre on our harvester. That's your job. You manage that? I'm just the tractor driver. Now, you I want you to lead on this. So maybe trying to usher in because there obviously will generally find that
they're more, uh, savvy when it comes to technology. So maybe getting in some younger people involved in the farm and giving them a core responsibility like that to work with might be a good thing to give them some ownership.
Okay, so we haven't got too much time left, Tim, but I've got a couple more questions. I was wondering whether you could quickly talk us through the technology that you think has been the best on your farm?
Oh. The best.
Or most profitable.
I reckon. Probably one of our ones I've got the most enjoyment out of probably has been things like the grid soil testing coupled with our moisture probes. I think the moisture probes have been really insightful to show where the actual moisture is in the soil throughout the season, and then trying to actually do essentially a yield profit model every month and refining that and trying to get as close as possible to our end goal. So where my old job was at the refinery. We did a
lot of spreadsheeting work. So it's really cool to look into that and then trying to get a I guess what I'm trying to say is we spend a lot of time guessing about how things are so variable rates are a fantastic example, variable rate. All the machines can do variable rate. Now the question is not can you do variable rate? It's what number do I put in there.
How much do you want to put on.
Yeah exactly. It's like what do I put in there. What number. And so it's all well and good for someone to give you a variable rate map. But the first thing they're going to say is how much do you want to apply. And you're like, well, that's the that's the hard part. The easy part is doing the map. So the question then is how can I get more
of those guesses to be more accurate? And so things like the soil probes that are telling you how much moisture is in the soil, and the weather stations recording the rainfall in that particular field or that zone, is giving you a way more accurate estimate of how much fertilizer to put out. And it'll be variable between the
neighbor's paddocks, like paddocks next to each other. Just by history is going to be different in that and you end up with this very different characterization in your application.
So you would put on what Yield prophet puts on.
I would. Yeah. Or more. But like it's the key thing is, is, is to try and get rid of those guesses in the game. I think I just don't like those guesses because it's not scientific. It's what BCG is all about, right? Research driven solutions and a lot of it is just gut feel. And that shouldn't be. We should be able to get some of those out. So you're always tweaking and tuning to try and clean
those out. And it's an 80 - 20 rule. You're always going to get the low hanging fruit, you're going to pick the easiest one to simplify weather station soil probe first step. The next one is how do I accurately model wheat growing in the Wimmera, you know, with this particular variety. But if it gets me 80% of the way there, that's okay. The next step will be the next step. And I'll take the next lowest hanging fruit after that.
I love that 8020 approach. It's so clever.
Yeah it is. It gives 20% error. It's great.
Which means yeah, it helps the head doesn't it. So what are you doing? What's the next thing.
I would really like? I've been hassling everybody about these profitability maps. I think profitability maps that could actually tell me where each hectare is performing versus full potential, and then using that to actually come up with more automated solutions. So at the moment, like we talked with variable rate, we're doing a lot of crunching on zones. How could
I make that automatic. How can I make the all these data layers we've been collecting every year off our harvester and our seeder and our sprayer and our spreader? How can on our grid sampling, how can I make the computer interpret a lot more of that data rather than me sitting there comparing maps? Can I just have a Siri to say Siri? Why is the left side of the paddock higher than the right side? And it'll go well. Back three years ago you actually did a
lime application there and that could be related. It matches perfectly and you go, oh, okay. But at the moment it's like there's too many data layers, too many satellite images for you to protest h umanly, it needs a like a virtual assistant. So I'd love to see it get to the point where we have a virtual assistant narrowing our viewpoint. So we're we're managers, we're not technicians. So farmers are managers. We should be making decisions about the
top five things every day. And it'd be great to have an assistant that sort of collated that end user data and not just feel really. So that's where it wants to be. And that'll come in with that profitability map too, because that'll come down to you'll be using that as your first layer. Is that piece as profitable as it could be?
That is an excellent point about the the AI or the virtual assistants for the farmer, because my big question I've written down here is how much time do you allocate to researching new technology?
I think it's one of those things you can do on the job, though, when you're spraying and you have an inspiration and you're running along beautifully and everything's going okay, then you. No trees, no power poles, then you you have time to look these things up and ponder them. So farmers I think by getting freed up with the technology, also gives them more time to think about these things.
And of course also to you're following friends. You're going to expos those sort of things and look for opportunities for seeing these new things, because you don't know what you don't know. So there could be a new tool out there, but your algorithm is not necessarily going to send you to the right technology if you've never looked for it before. So going to a field day and listening to a speaker talk about a new technique or
a new technology is always very insightful. And then you go back and research it, but you don't really spend that much time looking up those sort of things. Not until you're really getting close to I want to buy it. I think it's something that's really good fit to me. It's more about keeping abreast of everything and then banking it in your brain. And then when you encounter a problem, you go, ah, that thing I saw four weeks ago
could be handy. What was that called again? And you go looking for it, then maybe that's something we could do.
That makes sense too. So Tim, in terms of technology, we've had a bit of feedback that there's just so many providers, there's so much information and it can be really hard for farmers to know who to use, what technology to use, which one is going to be best. What would you say to them?
I think there's two ways about that. One is one is what are other people using. So our classic I was talking to Jess about Google, you know before Google there was heaps of search engines. And then when Google took over it was superior and everybody just jumped on. And now pretty much everybody does a Google search. Now whoever's the biggest is often the best for support and experience from other farmers, which is really good. So look
what other people have been using and using success. And you can ask a few of them, you know, how is that performing for you? What don't you like about it? What do you like about it? And then the other thing is, is the person that's actually selling the product is what sort of support are they giving? How good are they at understanding their product? Are they just a sales person? Are they a technician? Are they really there? If you form a good relationship with the retailer, that's
a really good start. But then also use farmer friends that have used it before to learn from. And things like WhatsApp groups have been a classic. We've been using WhatsApp groups for different technologies just so that we can communicate problems we've had, and whether somebody else has seen this before, and then the provider is all like, oh yeah, well, this is obviously happened twice. I should something we should fix. You know, it's a really good thing for them to.
Okay. And in terms of obviously youre, youre no till you're using your disc seeder and that sort of thing, we've had some pretty good years. We're really lucky here to have had some pretty good years. So there's been a lot of stubble around. And I mean, we sowed a paddock on the weekend and it had a heap of stubble on it and it was just amazing the moisture in that paddock. Yeah it was. We were pretty
happy about it. But it's tricky, isn't it, because sometimes you come up with a problem and you're thinking, oh, how am I going to, how am I going to get through this? But it's the technology that's got us there to get the more stubble. What would you.
Say? I think it can be really frustrating, and it can always be easy to fall back on what you know, and that can be something that's like 30 years ago and let's go and burn it and dig it up, and that'll solve my problem. But then I think the real challenge is can you save that gain? You've stepped up that ladder, you've gone from the ground level, you've stepped up, you've got that stubble retained. You've kept that moisture. It's fantastic. Can I somehow go up the ladder then,
rather than stepping back down to the bottom again? So is there a way that a technology could solve that problem? Is it just a bit of persistence? But this is where you learn and you actually go, when I did this, it really helped. You'll find that when we did the seeder trial about, oh, it's about 7 or 8 years ago now, the one near Birchip here, the best seeder
was the 15 year old Flexicoil. There was some brand new horsches or some precision seeders, but the best seeder was the 15 year flexicoil because it was his farm and he knew how to use it, and he'd used it 15 times in that field. He knew how to sow, whereas the new machines you're still learning. You haven't got
the full benefit out of it yet. So you don't abandon the brand new horsche and go to the 15 year old Flexicoil you go, well, I'm going to get this horsche to work in my system and you've got to keep stepping up. So take that challenge nut it out. Really a bit of persistence, a bit of support from someone else to get some ideas on how to fix that discs in wet conditions. What are other people doing to get through those wet conditions? How do they do that?
Can I keep climbing that ladder rather than starting back from scratch? Because as we climb that ladder, we're getting our yields are improving. We're getting way better soil health. It's better for our bottom line. We're getting way more sustainable farms.
Because it makes I can I keep coming back to rock climbing. I've been doing a tiny bit of rock climbing and it looks like it too. Yeah, and you want to go? You don't want to. It's hard going up. You want to come back down. You want to be in your comfort zone again, which is what you're talking about with staying with the flexicoil or or perhaps burning. But you've it's hard to climb up and it's going to be a challenge. But you know, when you get to the top, it's going to be awesome.
Absolutely. That's the goal is you always want to improve. Everybody wants to improve their farms. Otherwise they wouldn't be farmers. Um, they're custodians of the land. They're managing it. They want to do the best they possibly can. And sometimes you have to do things like dig up a paddock or burn it every now and again. But you really do want to keep moving forwards.
Even though, because I'm thinking you don't want to be moving forward with something that's not working, but using coming back to your principles, coming back to your problem solving approach. So have you ever pulled the pin on something?
Uh, yeah. We've, um, classic is, um, vetch and lentils, right? Vetch and lentils. They are almost cousins in, uh, variety, so there's very little chemistry to separate them. One of the solutions we initially ran with was a shielded sprayer. So we had a shielded sprayer to spray between the rows and spray the vetch out, which will get you probably 80% of the vetch. That was okay, except it's quite a scary job because you're spraying knock down chemicals in crop, and if you don't go on the vetch,
you kill the lentils, which is not good. But the other alternatives are, um, Clearfield lentils, which we do. So chemistry that allows us to try and kill the vetch. But it sort of probably only 80% effective. But then now they've introduced these green on green camera spraying, and they've invented a algorithm that identifies purple flowers. And so when we change to the bigger seeder the shielded sprayer was too narrow to match the big seeder. So we got
rid of it. And we've essentially going to rely on the Clearfield chemistry and the camera spraying to hopefully control the vetch in the lentils for now. So it's a slow evolution. We tried it. It kind of worked good. We did get some additional benefits. We used it in oats to clean the rows between the oats of, but then it didn't fit and come to its end of its life. And we moved on and gone to a new solution.
And I can hear that it's sort of coming back to a how many of those principles does it align with?
That's right, that's right. It was a frustrating, scary job. Um, but it was a really cool machine, like very clever. And I think if I'd be tempted to get it again, I mean, if you think about weed smart and the big six, you know, how many different ways can you kill weeds? It's a really good way of introducing a different attack on that weed and reduce that seed bank.
So it's probably worthwhile having as a tool in the shelf, but it's obviously more money sitting in the shed that you don't use that often.
Last question, Tim, what is the best advice you've been given? This is just one I like to throw in there.
I think sometimes we dilly dally on our decision making and we agonize over it. And it might take you five years to get your back garden done, for instance.
That's me.
But if you just had it done the first year, you would have had five years of benefit out of it. So I think sometimes, uh, you probably should just say it's 80 over 20. We just got to do it. We got to take a punt, take a risk. We think it's going to work back yourself to solve it. You've got good support and try it and get start reaping the benefits rather than waiting for this perfect solution to come down the track. In the end, it may never turn up.
So take action. Make a decision.
Take action. Make a decision.