Hi tech in the outback

In the weekend AFR there was an uplifting story about this couple - Andrew and Jocie Bate, wheat farmers in central Queensland - way out in the outback. You can read the whole article here, so I am just going to talk about what took my fancy.

Basically over a number of years they have developed various robots that will do some of the tedious farm jobs. They did it, initially on their own, then with help from various research institutes and big business, plus a bit of tax help from the government. But to me the really great thing about this is that the business is growing - it is apparently one of the very few in the world - and is attracting high tech people to outback Queensland to develop such machines. They now have 17 people - experts in robotics, AI, engineering, all the skills you would need and all living in Emerald near their farm.

Of late with all the talk about climate change and the increasing difficulty of living out in the bush I had envisaged a future Australia in which everyone was living on the coastal strip, with nobody inland. And yet here we have a new industry just bursting with ideas starting miles from anywhere.

Juliet the robot who started all this is shown behind them - not a tiny thing, but self-driving. And what does she do?

"Every few minutes, the state-of-the art orange robot slows its steady, precise pace. Her cameras have automatically detected an emerging weed; instantly one of the 48 nozzles on the attached spray boom targets a minuscule amount of herbicide at the offending plant to kill it off before it can spread or seed.

Then Juliet trundles on, with no thought of a break or knock-off time. She can cover the vast, flat wheat paddock, and kill all competing weeds, in a day; a task that would take a big tractor with a driver nearly three days. The cost and chemical usage is reduced to such an extent that weed-inspection can be repeated cost-effectively every three weeks, instead of just once or twice a year, preserving critical soil moisture for the next crop."

And it goes all night too.

In fact they are now looking at the robot digging up the offending weeds rather than spraying them. Solar power, batteries, etc. etc. It seems to be a win win situation. I imagine that there is not actually a lot of manual labour on a wheat farm. They have huge machines to do things - although I guess these are costly and fuel guzzling. What really got Andrew Bate was the time that he had to spend on the weed killing task which took him away from his family. Which is what started him on the whole thing. Now he can concentrate on other things - like building better and more advanced machines and selling them to the world.

Well not selling - leasing. They are leased for a certain number of years and then replaced with a new machine when the technology changes. Which sounds very generous but I suspect the leasing costs are pretty high.

Neither of these people were high tech people. He was a farmer and agronomist, and she an economist. So good business heads, but not necessarily the technical skills.

You have to wonder though whether eventually such farms will have any people on them. I mean I guess virtually all of the tasks could be done by robots. But then I suppose robots break down and need fixing, and refuelling too, so I suppose you would need somebody there. And there must be advantages in developing new machines where you are going to use them.

So well done Andrew and Jocie Bate. And if they start up a new industry in the outback well done again.

“It’s really cool we are building careers and jobs like this in rural Australia; no one thought we could succeed without being in a capital city, It also shows that robotics and autonomous agriculture is creating jobs of the future on farms and in agriculture, not replacing them.” Jocie Bate