Lift farming profits by downsizing our machinery

Farmers are wasting too much money and effort by putting their faith in big, heavy and complicated equipment for little productivity gain, says Central Queensland agronomist and a director of robotic farm equipment innovator SwarmFarm, Neville Crook.

“If we’re going to lift productivity we must get farmers out of the tractor cab and back down at ground level to focus on individual plant management. Let the machinery work itself.”

The SwarmFarm business at Emerald has been a driving force in developing box trailer-sized robotic platforms to work in paddocks around the clock without needing a farmer nearby.

While current generation of “Swarmbots” have been initially built with weed spraying capabilities, Mr Crook said the technology would soon be adapted for tillage, precision planting and mowing.

The units follow tramlines, avoid obstacles (including livestock) and even proved capable of refuelling and refilling their own chemical tanks automatically in trials on Andrew and Jocie Bate’s grain and cattle property which has 4000 hectares of cropping country.  

Mr Bates began looking at downsizing his machinery inventory to get more productive bang for his buck 10 years ago, initiating research with agricultural robotics researchers at Queensland University of Technology and the University of Sydney.

Among his supporters, and a SwarmFarm shareholder, is Queensland’s recent one-term Premier, Campbell Newman, who now chairs the business.  

Mr Crook told this year’s National Farmers Federation Congress grain farming productivity gains were slowing to a standstill, partly because the big equipment trend was not really making Australian farmers more efficient any more.

The drive to achieve greater efficiency from fewer numbers of farmers working bigger areas had left Australia’s mostly family-owned farming enterprises forking out big money for faster, wider, more powerful, heavier and more expensive, high tech gear in the hope of getting the bigger job done speedily.

Instead it was putting more weight on the farm balance sheet, and the soil, and not necessarily achieving the seeding and spraying accuracy today’s cropping systems needed.

Frustration with variable seeding depths using a big 36-metre-wide unit working at speed was one factor which pushed Mr Bate to investigate small-scale robotic machinery options.

While switching to controlled traffic and no-till farming had temporarily lifted his productivity, these systems required bigger, heavier machinery which he found undermined yield gains by creating soil compaction and accuracy problems.

Mr Crook said Swambots did not need to operate at 20 kilometres an hour like the big rigs because farmers would use several working at about eight km/hour to do the same job – and the machines could work all night if necessary.

The five currently working on the Bate’s property at Gindie, south of Emerald, are powered by 18 kilowatt diesel motors with hydraulic and electronic components which can be easily swapped or replaced without needing a specially qualified technician.

The current custom-built generation of Swarmbot platforms cost about $150,000 to make and include weed seeking gear worth $40,000, but SwarmFarm wants to get a commercial price for its autonomous units down to a cost equivalent to a four-wheel-drive ute.

They were not just be lighter and more nimble than 4WD articulated tractors or giant self-propelled spray rigs and super-sized cultivation and seeding gear, but would also have dual purpose roles and be more cost effective, Mr Crook said

He also believed smaller more prescriptive gear was critical to tackling Australia’s big battle with weed resistance to herbicides.

He said farmers needed far more disciplined approaches to weed control than relying on big capacity spray rigs and broad scale chemical applications.

“We’ve got the number two weed resistance problem in the world and we have to recognise the fact zero-till agriculture is really under threat if we don’t find a way to deal with it,” he said.

A critical breakthrough would developing technology to identify the difference between green weeds and green crops - research which had already been done many times, but was yet to be commercialised.

He said future Swarmbot platforms may even be equipped with microwave or heated foam technology to zap individual weeds, or use robotic chip hoes to dig them up.

“But Australian farmers won’t be able to stay in business if we can’t identify weeds on an individual basis and learn how to eliminate them before chemical resistance gets much worse, he said.

“We don’t need to waste our farming manpower chaperoning modern tractors around a paddock – tractors already have the technology to drive themselves.

“We must encourage young people to get closer to the plant growing action and understand what’s going on.”