Hands Free

Left: Food Agility chief scientist David Lamb, left, with Food Agility CEO Richard Norton, Charles Sturt University interim vice-chancellor John Germov, and Charles Sturt University chief operating officer Rick Willmott at the site of the future Global Digital Farm

Australia’s first ever ‘handsfree’ farm will be built and developed in a bid to demonstrate the future of farming through robotics

and artificial intelligence

Charles Sturt University (CSU) has partnered with the Food Agility Cooperative Research Centre to develop the Global Digital Farm, which will be built at CSU’s 1,900-hectare AgriPark at its Wagga Wagga campus. The high-tech collaboration will be Australia’s first fully automated commercial farm, which the parties hope will develop new sustainability and carbon models to bring new improvements to farming practices. The parties will spend the next three years developing data and telecommunications infrastructure, and other digital technologies, at the AgriPark site, which currently comprises wheat, barley and canola crops as well as a vineyard, cattle and sheep. Food Agility chief scientist Niall Blair says the new facility will provide insights into a range of contemporary technologies beneficial for farming. “This ambitious and unique project will arm Australia’s primary industries workforce with knowledge and technology in crucial fields like data analytics, geospatial mapping, remote sensing, machine learning and cyber security,” says Blair. Food Agility chief executive Richard Norton says full automation of farms is not a distant concept, and that the technology produced by the GDF would help put the two bodies at the forefront of that change. “It won’t be too many years before technology will take farmers out of the field and immerse them in the world of robotics, automation and artificial intelligence,” he says. Once built, the GDF will develop and operate technologies such as fully autonomous machinery including robotic tractors, harvesters, drones and surveying equipment as well as artificial intelligence, which will make informed decisions on sowing, dressing and harvesting. CSU will also develop a state of the art cyber secure environment to establish the best practice of cyber security risks associated in modern day food production. New sensor technology, which measure interactions between plants, soils and animals, will also be a point of focus, while the GDF will also analyse different carbon management and measurement models and sustainability practices based on evidence. The GDF will be headed by Food Agility chief scientist, Professor David Lamb. The announcement of the GDF follows previous investment into CSU’s AgriPark with the university announcing $14 million for the first stage of capital works at the facility in April while a federal government grant of $8 million – plus another $11.9 million from various consortium partners – had also been invested.

Left: The CropCount technology is a far more accurate tool to predict avocado yield

avocado

toast

Currently in development at the University of New England, a new app has been created to help farmers forecast their avocado yield with increasing accuracy

Anew app being developed by the University of New England’s (UNE) Applied Agricultural Remote Sensing Centre (AARSC) can forecast the avocado yield with up to 93 per cent accuracy. Research conducted in 2017 by UNE indicated avocado yield forecasting in a medium-sized orchard of 10,000 trees can be inaccurate by as much as 120 per cent. Instead, the CropCount app uses satellite imagery and targeted on-ground sampling to produce the accurate forecasts in a fraction of the time it would take growers to estimate yields using traditional methods. An algorithm within CropCount then identifies which trees should be counted to provide growers with the more accurate snapshot of health and yield across the orchard. Funded by Hort Innovation and co-developed by creative agency Circul8, the CropCount project is far more time efficient for growers, AARSC director Andrew Robson says. “It reduces the number of tree counts required from 70 to 1,000, to just 18. With CropCount, growers take nine hours to do their yield forecast, not the 500 hours they once did,” he says. “With CropCount, growers record the fruit count for those 18 trees on the app, which sends the data to us. We do the processing and derive a yield map, fruit size map, tree disease map and a forecast for the block [or paddock], which goes back to the grower to inform their decision-making. “The accuracy at the block level is better than 90 per cent. At the farm level, it’s generally better than that.” Robson says the app takes yield variability into consideration, which he says is commonplace in avocado production. Avocados suffer from irregular or alternate bearing meaning trees which product 1,000 units one year may only produce a handful the next. “It is very difficult to do a generic prediction for yield forecasting,” says Robson. CropCount also accounts for other factors that may affect avocado yields, including diseases such as phytophthora, tree pruning and weather, with each season manually calibrated individually to provide growers with the most accurate estimate. The app was built to work effectively when offline with the ability to sync when users were back online. Currently, the CropCount app is in its prototype phase, with Robson and the team at UNE hoping to complete the full version of the app within the next six to 12 months. Its availability to the Australian market, including avocado growing regions in Western Australia and South Australia, remains a main priority. The key markets of South America and South Africa, which account for over a quarter of the global avocado production, have also been identified as potential opportunities for the product. Following the commercial rollout of the CropCount for avocados, it’s understood the technology could be translated to work across tree crops such as apples and stone fruit.