Producer Tour 2024 – Exploring the Victorian heartland of broadacre
The 2024 Pre-accelerator cohort celebrated the end of our first month together through regional Victoria, getting behind the scenes access to multiple innovative farms and being able to connect our industry and farmer friends. With the weather on our side, over two days, a warm welcome was given as the cohort ventured to the Horsham Smartfarm, Regional Livestock Exchange, a private commercial farm in Jill Jill and a quick pitstop to the Creswick Woollen Mills.
With a range of different producers in the mix, the cohort was intentional and passionate in liaising with their peers and professionals in getting a deeper understanding and first-hand insights into livestock management, farm operations, broadacre challenges and cropping techniques.
Catch the A24 graduates pitch their idea in Werribee on 13 June, together with a room full of local farmers - ready to provide their two cents and words of wisdom for the agtech founders who are starting their journey.
🍎 all things wool 🍐
Creswick Woollen Mills is in Creswick, a small township, 120km outside of Melbourne CBD. The Mill is a family-owned business and is the last of its kind, in designing and manufacturing natural fibre textiles since 1947. As we walked through the interactive exhibition ‘A Very Fine Yarn,’ we gained insight into the history of the Mill, from the source of natural fibres to the manufacturing process and into the retail section, ready for purchase.
Our quick self-guided tour showcased the evolution of the company, creating high quality fabrics and the development process of creating Fire-retardant blankets for the Country Fire Authority (CFA) and NSW Rural Fire Service. Not only is Creswick the sole supplier of blankets to the CFA for more than 20 years, they have maintained meaningful relationships with their partnerships with brands such as David Jones, creating high quality natural fibre products.
The cohort was left inspired as they gained knowledge on how a small-scale woollen spinning mill was able to streamline and diversify their natural fibre operation and competing with international imports, while committing to producing Australian made products.
🚜 Smartfarm: into the world of grains 💨
The Horsham Smartfarm is an government approach to improving the productivity in the grains industry, with systems implemented to promote:
sustainability
profitability
understanding the impacts of climate change
adapting through different grain cropping systems
Digital technology is also used to increase the productivity for grain farmers, as well as a 600-hectare farm used for research purposes, including crop protection and biosecurity, soil management and new pulse variety breeding.
These improvements in productivity are made through the The Australian Grains Genebank Strategic Partnership, which is an extensive research investment between the Victorian government and Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC). This 30-million-dollar venture enables cutting-edge researchers to transform the Australian Grains Genebank (AGG) into a bio-digital seedbank resource centre, beneficial to Australian grain growers. With this research, AGG aims to advance in crop improvement, in producing climate-change resilient, high yielding, high quality crop varieties.
Learn more about the Australian Grains Genebank research here.
The Australian Grains Genebank
What is climate resilient crops?
Resilient crops refer to creating better versions of crops at an accelerated rate with lower input cost, to help farmers increase their yield and profits. Shifts in weather patterns can be predicted, therefore creating crops with withstand the harsh conditions can help farming productivity.
Problems AGG aims to solve is finding new ways to create climate resilient crops, in finding the best crops for certain climate conditions, making the process highly efficient for grain growers who have access to the gene information. This is undertaken through experimentation, by collecting traits from high performing seeds being used to develop crops of higher quality. The data and information collected allows the integration of genotypic information.
How AGG categorises this data:
AGG’s collection consists of a staggering 190,000 types of seeds, spanning over 1,250 species! 😯
All seeds are hand sampled with a unique QR code and is included in the online data system. As technology advances, AGG have started the imaging of seeds, capturing high resolution images of seeds, which can then identify specific traits of seeds and increase the level of information provided with low labour. The data collection of seeds is still growing, as AGG adopts new technologies for creating a database in an economic way with research projects being created to facilitate more detailed and extensive databases for grains.
Plant Pathology
This Smartfarm is the only lab that performs disease identification and implements solutions to protect the Australian production from disease! Disease management and utilising varieties to overcome resistance was a key area that AGG was collectively working on.
Issues such as food security were addressed as new hybridised varieties of grains with high protein content are created to meet the high demands of nutrient dense foods.
Helpful disease management resources:
Soil and Plant Processing Centre
A key emphasis of the work is around profitability for farmers.
Important points include:
soil health and nutrient efficiency.
using 3D technology printing to understand the impact of soil quality.
drones used to create data with high accuracy and low labour costs.
indicating stressors of a plant and high-resolution photographic technology and graphs.
Issues discussed during the Q&A session at Smartfarm:
having trust + accountability, in making mistakes and learning to adapt to changes in a farm setting
personnels in the industry having increased workload post COVID
lack of the standardisation of data collection
🐮 livestock exchange, saleyard technology and More 🤠
Fortunate to catch up with the ever so generous Paul Christopher (onsite manager) on his day off, we were given a rundown of the operations of the Horsham Regional Livestock Exchange. Having operated since 1999, it is Victoria’s fourth largest sheep and lamb market, attracting individuals from as far as South Australia and New South Wales.
Key problems such as animal welfare were addressed as highly important, as standards have changed overtime largely due to generational change and tight biosecurity laws within Australia.
Protocols and steps taken to prevent diseases entering the system can be an arduous necessity, as trading can and will cease nationwide if a disease is identified in one single state (which is different to the European systems).
The electronic identification (EID) tags placed on every livestock is transmitted via the RFID device. As livestock are sold, EID’s will get allocated to certain buyers and livestock sold to arborators. If diseases are present, the chain line can be identified and tracked, stopping the spreading of unwanted diseases.
Did you know?
Radio Frequency Identification (RDIF) tags can be used for retail theft prevention, tracking your suitcase that’s lost in transition, but it’s most commonly used across the agriculture industry in tracking and storing livestock data (also called “ear tags”)
Pain points within the industry?
disease control + preventing outbreaks
market fluctuations + economic factors and the profitability of livestock operations
regulatory compliance including animal welfare and food safety
adoption of technology - too advanced and expensive
“Losing money breaks people’s hearts.”
🐮 Back to grains - farming 101 🤠
Our last stop on the journey, a special tour of Windarra farm in Jil Jil, ran by Julie & Tim McClelland (GRDC Southern Panellist). From the beginning of the sowing season to the harvesting of crops in the later seasons, heavy machinery is used for farming operations.
Note-worthy machinery:
specialty crop tractors to pull farming equipment
combines harvesters to turn cereal crops into grains
fertiliser spreaders to distribute fertiliser across a field
seeders to spread seeds across large plots
An observation of the tour is how often the conversation spins off into on the spot maths calculations, where it’s evident that decision making is heavily dependent on risk management, cost effective gains and opportunity costs. Whist the math-savvy cohort members mentally jogged alongside Tim’s improv decision making walkthrough, we jotted down some points to help illustrate his thought processes:
+ Cost of spraying herbicides and pesticides is $400,000
+ Spraying done 5 times a year, over 40,000 hectares.
+ Cost of sprayer can go up to $120,000 depending on factors such as demand and manufacture source
+ Cost of machinery can be prorated to $100 a hectare, factoring in maintenance, labour, and operational cost
Further insight into the mechanical functioning of the machinery was given:
how wingspan of the sprayer machine used increases with newer models
spraying at 30km/hr was the ideal speed considering wind conditions.
prevention > correction: fungicide spray to be applied way before disease hits
climate conditions based decision
Picking paddocks with high yield to patch spray = redirecting cost and effort investment for higher chances of return
Windarra farm’s use of mix cropping and sheep operations not only ensures a diversified investment of effort and capital, a guaranteed steady hum of operations across all seasons, and also passing on the legacy of sheep farming roots from the family.
“Tim really knew his numbers and the whole system. He wasn’t chasing multiple rabbits and missing them all. He knew his business and what the profit drivers were and what would compromise his business. ”
Key ponder points from our time on the farm were the overall importance of a 10-year plan and implementing processes that will help in the future. Creating a community with like-minded local farmers was also a helpful tip from Tim, in sharing crop yield data and spraying times on a WhatsApp group. This illustrates the tightness of the community, the industry’s culture of over the fence advice, the strength of word of mouth and accountability, authenticity and trust amongst farmers.
This two-day adventure was an opportunity for cohort members to drink straight from the educational fire hose that the experts in the space has to offer. A special thanks to our invaluable partners and friends at Agriculture Victoria, LaunchVic, Horsham Smartfarm, GRDC, AUSVEG, Tim and Julie McClelland at Windarra farms, Grace Hosking at Birchip Cropping Group, and all the other guests that were able to join us along the way, making this a fruitful and enriching experience.
If you would like to join along insightful tours like this one or see what's on in the agtech space, join our AgTech Meetup Community today to be notified of our upcoming events.
💬 If you are an agtech startup with a solution for a pain point addressed above, get in touch with us at info@sproutx.com.au.
Join us at our upcoming Pub Pitch in Werribee, Victoria to meet our industry partners and farmer friends in person.
RSVP to secure your seat here.