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SWAN Systems: Delivering Precision Irrigation to Australian Farmers Osmoflo's platform helps farmers plan and schedule their irrigation.
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WAN Systems, based in Perth, Australia, has built an Internet of things (IoT) platform that helps farmers synthesize irrigation data from multiple sources for more precise irrigation. SWAN’s decision-support software allows for better irrigation and nutrient management, the optimized use of scarce resources, and better environmental outcomes. Currently active in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the Middle East, SWAN is looking for partners for a trial expansion into the United States in 2020. In this interview, Tim Hyde, the chief executive officer (CEO) of SWAN Systems, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about the benefits SWAN’s platform provides to irrigators in Australia and around the world. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Tim Hyde: SWAN Systems has three founders—Rod Campbell, Ivor Gaylard, and myself. All of us have significant agricultural experience. I personally was born and raised in the Sunraysia region of Australia’s Riverland, which is geographically and agriculturally similar to California—it is hot and dry and irrigation is required to grow crops. I then completed a degree in horticulture and irrigation at Adelaide University in South Australia. After university, I grew subtropical crops, including table grapes, bananas, vegetables, and citrus fruits, for 15 years, using precision irrigation and nutrient strategies, often called open-field hydroponics. I then consulted for 10 years in this field. SWAN Systems essentially evolved from this consulting business. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your company, its history, and its operations today.
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Joshua Dill: Tell us about your products. Do you produce software, hardware, or both? Tim Hyde: SWAN Systems is a software-as-a-service platform that provides solutions for the smarter scheduling and monitoring of water and nutrient applications. It uses sophisticated algorithms to process data from a number of different sources, including weather forecasts of rainfall, evapotranspiration, temperature, and wind speed; actual water application volumes taken directly from irrigation controllers; soil moisture data to reconcile the soil moisture balance calculations; and spatial data from satellites and drones to further reconcile plant health via normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) imagery. The intelligence of the system has been derived from many years working in the precision ag space, where it is imperative to determine when and how much to irrigate and fertilize to optimize production. The client base, particularly Rio Tinto in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, demanded reporting and monitoring functionality, and this drove the development of SWAN’s compliance functionality. SWAN has developed this intellectual property into a web-based system that is now largely automated and can be scaled to cover a range of diverse applications. Watering schedules are typically generated from historical data and often implemented with a “set and forget” mindset. Actual within-season variations mean that these historical averages are often inaccurate, leading to suboptimal water consumption, poor crop health, and ineffective fertilization. SWAN’s ability to use location-specific weather forecasts provides the ability to proactively manage weather volatility. The incorporation of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s 7-day
PHOTO COURTESY OF OSMOFLO.
Tim Hyde: SWAN Systems is an IoT platform that helps farmers farm more precisely and increase the quality and yields of their crops. Rod, Ivor, and I knew how precious water is and how technology is the ideal way to optimize water and nutrient application rates and consumption for just about any plant or crop. The more we looked, the more
we saw that the problem of water usage was endemic and global, with no easy solution. Our vision is to be a globally recognized independent software platform for managing water and nutrients and to help lead users to adopt precision agriculture. From its conception, it has taken 3 years to fully build out the platform, mainly due to the complexities of using different types of hardware.
