Game changing technologies in agriculture

00:23 - At the Goondiwindi update, one speaker who shared his international experience did so from a very different perspective as a Fullbright scholar.

00:32 - The purpose of the Fulbright was really trying to understand the landscape for agricultural technologies where new technologies are emerging, how those technologies inform future challenges both on a global scale, but also how those technologies will inform some of the challenges that we have at the farm level as well.

00:50 - The study tour was a quick four month trip to attend Texas A&M University and see where European agtech R&D is heading.

00:59 - As Professor Baillie told the update audience, the focus of his mission was game changing technologies in agriculture.

01:06 - There’s been large investments in agricultural technologies in the last five to six years and in fact, last year there was as much as 20 billion dollars invested in agtech. And if you go back probably six or seven years ago, that was probably only about two or three dollars billion. So there’s been a rapid investment in agtech globally.

01:24 - And one of the things I wanted to do was look at what’s fuelling that investment, where are those technologies are being developed.

01:30 - And one of the things that underpins this story is the the growing trend, I guess, in terms of our population growth and that by the end of the century it’s likely to be 11 billion people.

01:39 - And so what that says is if we want to save the world in terms of food and and other resources, we need to produce 50 per cent more than what we’re currently producing now.

01:48 - Where will the 50 per cent growth in food production come from? In Australia, arable land is a finite resource, but how we farm makes a difference.

01:59 - While larger farms are generally more productive, adoption of technology and innovative farming practises is related to increased productivity and farmer profitability in the order of 20 per cent. if all farms performed this well, output would increase 18 per cent and farm incomes 24 per cent.

02:20 - While increasing farm size can drive economies of scale of key importance is matching inputs such as labour and machinery to the size of a farm business to maximise profitability and rising productivity helps offset falling terms of trade.

02:38 - Where there’s still a challenge is yield gap, the difference between potential and actual yield.

02:44 - In most developing countries, it’s greater than 50 per cent.

02:47 - And under that, for exporting nations like Australia.

02:50 - Wider adoption of agricultural technologies will have the greatest impact on closing that gap, according to Professor Baillie.

02:59 - Well, I guess, you know, if you think back in history, there’s been waves of technologies being developed and we can go back to what we call the first revolution, which was really around mechanisation.

03:08 - But then there was the you might recall, the Green Revolution and the Green Revolution was in the 60s.

03:13 - And that was the introduction of irrigation fertilisers and ag chem to get large increases in production. So we had something like three times increase in production through the Green Revolution.

03:25 - And then more recent times, we’ve had genetics and we’ve had precision agriculture and conservation farming and those sort of things. But the next wave or the fourth revolution is around, I guess, electronics, digital agriculture, automation, robotics, those sorts of things.

03:40 - Professor Baillie told delegates ag machinery manufacturers are not only developing autonomous machinery, they are working towards making it possible for multibrand machines to talk to each other via the cloud.

03:53 - And a visit to the Agritechnica Trade Show in Germany gave Professor Baillie a chance to see some of that latest agricultural technology.

04:02 - And this is some common thinking around where tractors and machinery is likely to go from a European perspective.

04:09 - And this is what they call their swarm farm initiative, but also in particularly in Europe.

04:15 - There’s a trend, if you like, to going towards renewable energy.

04:19 - And so the tractor here on the left, the blue tractor, is being run on biogas, biomethane, I should say.

04:27 - And the operating costs are about 30 per cent less and 80 per cent reduction in overall emissions.

04:32 - So there’s also a focus not only increasing our productivity on farm profitability, but also looking at some of the environmental benefits impacts as well.

04:42 - From what’s happening in Europe, Professor Baillie’s update presentation moved on to global investment.

04:48 - Agfunder is a US based investment platform that brings together venture capitalists and innovation opportunities and annually reports on agrifood investments globally by grouping technologies into various categories.

05:03 - This provides a good sense of agtech developments and emerging technologies.

05:08 - Ag biotech is one of the categories in particular.

05:10 - The thing I wanted to point out here is the development of microbiomes and large investments in this space around seed coating so that they identify naturally occurring microbiomes and incorporate that into seed coatings to provide some sort of beneficial to the plant.

05:27 - Gene editing is also part of the mix in this space.

05:30 - And this is where you’re trying to get the the the plant to exhibit different traits without actually genetically modifying the plant.

05:38 - Another category in this fourth wave world is the Agri-Business Marketplace, which is seeing farmer to farmer networking broaden.

05:46 - The interest in this category, if you like, is where a farmer might be able to identify where they can get the cheapest, cheapest drum of Roundup.

05:54 - So a little bit like a Trivago for for identifying the best price, if you like, for ag chemicals.

06:00 - For farm management software, the focus at Agritechnica was on data collectiveness.

06:06 - Tractor manufacturers and third parties such as AgriRouter are leading the charge.

06:12 - In robotics, the way ahead is machines that will go beyond automating a process.

06:17 - There’s a couple of development pathways here.

06:20 - One is around improving the performance of current machinery, so adding more and more features to current machinery versus smaller multiple machines that are modular and and consist of robotic swarms.

06:33 - So the idea here is moving from highly automated machinery via artificial intelligence to fully autonomous systems.

06:43 - Professor Baillie’s presentation finished on novel farming systems, which looked at ways of intensifying production.

06:50 - If you look at some of the vertical farming operations that are currently underway, 95 per cent less land, 95 per cent less water and 10 times more yield with no pesticides.

07:01 - And these systems are really highly automated.

07:04 - What broadacre farmers can take from such novel farming systems is the recognition that agtech is changing farming and the type of people who support agriculture in the future.

07:15 - Agtech companies in the US are interested in artificial intelligence, and they are looking to align their operations with skill sets that are normally seen in Silicon Valley in those places.

07:26 - And so you’re seeing a change of the sort of people that might be employed by those companies in the future.

07:32 - But that also informs the sort of people that might be employed on farm in the future as well.

07:36 - Professor Craig Bailey from the University of Southern Queensland.

07:41 - And this video is one in a series of update videos recorded at the 2020 GRDC Grains Research Updates. .