HORTICULTURE
remote control Perth-based Swan Systems uses Cloud-based technology to help farmers manage their water use, irrigation and crop health. By Lincoln Bertelli
Above: Swan Systems says that water savings can be achieved from between 20 to 30 per cent
We built systems which helped us to take that data and turn it into meaningful day-to-day operational decisions.
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hat started as a challenge during a consulting job for Rio Tinto has evolved into a company that beat global competition for an agricultural technology startup award last December. Founded in 2016, Swan’s origins can be traced further back to 2010 when two of the eventual co-founders – Ivor Gaylard and Tim Hyde, whose backgrounds are in farming and consulting – were working with mining giant Rio Tinto on an environmentallysensitive job near Karijini National Park in Western Australia. “They needed to know seven days in advance, on any given day, how much water was going where,” says Gaylard, who is Swan’s chief operating officer and head of product development. “There were a lot of extra challenges over and above normal farming challenges. “We took our existing systems and ways of doing things and added an extra level on to that, so over a couple of years we built systems which enabled us to do that efficiently. “They had installed a lot of soil moisture sensors, flow meters [and] weather stations, and a lot of that data was coming through to our office. “We built systems which helped us to take that data and turn it into meaningful day-to-day operational decisions – working out the optimum amount of water to apply, the fertiliser program and doing all the reporting.” The success of this led to further interest from other parties and, in 2016, Gaylard and Hyde joined with Rod Campbell and formed Swan Systems to commercialise their product. “We basically took what was an in-house system and put it on the Cloud and made it scalable and suitable for any crop and any irrigation system,” says Gaylard.
WINNING PITCH Swan – which stands for Scheduling Water and Nutrients – first took out the top honour in the Digital Innovation category at
WA’s Innovator of the Year awards in 2018. It then won the global ag-tech category in Rabobank’s Foodbytes! Pitch awards for startups last year and was one of only two Australian companies named in a subsequent Rabobank report as ‘startups to watch’ in 2021. So, for a software-based innovation, rather than a physical piece of farm equipment, how does it all work? “Swan is a decision-support system. It integrates with a lot of hardware but we don’t deal with hardware ourselves,” says Gaylard. “In a lot of cases, we can come in and the farmer has got some existing hardware and we just plug in to that. We bring their data in and help them make daily irrigation decisions – how much to irrigate, when to irrigate and manage their seasonal water use so they can do budgeting, planning for the season and then track their water use against that budget over the season. “We can help do fertiliser programs or bring in their own programs and then track what they’re actually doing against that program and allow them to manage that, and we bring in satellite imagery as well which they can use to keep an eye on the health of their fields and identify issues, particularly irrigation-related issues. “There are some directly measurable financial benefits. A lot of the time there are water savings and quite often in the region of 20 to 30 per cent. “There are also yield increases by providing plants with optimum water and quality increases as well so the effect on a farmer’s bottom line is significant and measurable. “There are a whole lot of benefits that are harder to quantify like more efficient oversight of what’s going on, easier management and incorporating best practice in a systemised way so staff coming in and out can quickly pick up what’s going on.”
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