GROWER perspectives on the use of robots in cotton farming, and a look at what is coming in the satellite space and also weed control , took centre stage in the Gear Up for Future Farming session at last week’s biennial Australian Cotton Conference

Held at the Gold Coast over three days, the conference was attended by around 2800 delegates, with the future farming session one of many to fill the room with its focus on how to improve sustainability and efficiency with more targeted weed control.

James Pursehouse of Pursehouse Farms, which owns and operates Breeza Station on the Liverpool Plains of north-west New South Wales as an irrigated and dryland grower, and Rob Eveleigh, provided the grower perspectives around the use of a SwarmBot unit at each operation.

As part of Gary Coulton & Eveleigh Agronomics, Mr Eveleigh is involved with cropping 1400ha of dryland country east of Bellata on the north-west plains of NSW.

Both growers gave insights into using SwarmFarm Swarmbot unit, with DataFarming co-founder Tim Neale talking about the decreasing lag time and increasing accuracy of satellite-informed spray maps.

Robots valuable additions

The Pursehouse unit, nicknamed Mooki after the farm’s boundary river, runs on 4m centres over a 13m RBE boom, and carries a 1500-litre tank, and WeedIT Quadro cameras.

It has high clearance, and weighs 5 tonnes fully loaded.

Mooki has clocked up 1490 engine hours, and runs on John Deere GreenStar guidance lines exported into a farm manager program, which Mr Pursehouse said “saved a lot of boundary mapping”.

Average per-hour figures include 9.7ha sprayed, 8 litres of fuel used, and a running cost of $4/ha.

While Mooki is slower than a 36m sprayer, and more accurate at 10km/hr than 15km/hr, Mr Pursehouse said it was a welcome addition to the farming team with many benefits.

“The big one is greater staff utilisation,” Mr Pursehouse said.

Mr Pursehouse said the arrival of the SwarmBot has prompted the operation’s switch to a proactive rather than reactive approach to fallow spraying.

Its ability to work unsupervised, and at all hours of the day and night, is the bonus.

“It doesn’t get hungover, it doesn’t mind getting to work at 3am, and it loves a public holiday.

Mr Pursehouse said they are working towards using the SwarmBot on irrigated country also.

“When we bring our irrigation country in, we’ll probably end up with a second robot.”

Mr Pursehouse said getting headlands smooth, and mapping right, were two key requirements for Mooki’s successful operation, and gave thanks to SwarmFarm, Rasmussen Bros Engineering, and Darling Downs Spray Technology for helping with glitches and maintenance.

“I was expecting to have a few little technical issues with that level of technology.”

Mr Pursehouse said his wishlist for the technology was to integrate Australia’s own WAND, or weather and networked data, into the unit’s operation.

Mr Eveleigh said their unit, which operates on undulating country, has 1500 hours on the clock, and covers 1400ha on three non-contiguous dryland farms in the Bellata area.

“The robot really has given us more time to do other things,” Mr Eveleigh said.

“We spray while we plant cotton.

“It’s like having another person that doesn’t backchat.”

As with Pursehouse Farms, Mr Eveleigh said their SwamBot has had some easily solvable electronic issues, and that getting field mapping was a crucial part of the equation.

Mr Eveleigh said the unit’s light weight gave it a significant operational advantage.

“It’s the first machine used after rain.”

New features he was looking forward to seeing included a dual battery, and a function which would spray fencelines.

More, better images

DataFarming’s Tim Neale spoke about the company’s use of satellite imagery to reduce herbicide use, and its first year of a four-year project.

It is funded by the SmartSat Cooperative Research Centre and the Grains Research and Development Corporation to inform alternatives to blanket spraying, which is exacerbating the already serious problem of herbicide resistance.

“We have a long history, over 20 years now, of working with super high-resolution data in Australia, and we’ve used the latest-generation military-grade satellites that are super super high resolution.”

Using buffered algorithms, DataFarming can then generate a file to guide spray equipment on the ground “without any capex spend at all”.

“That file can go straight into the machine”.

“These machines are ready to go; they just need the files to actually do it”.

DataFarming is using satellite images to generate files to spray weeds in fallow, and also to spray ryegrass in wheat to test green-on-green capabilities from the much more accurate and numerous images now available.

He said this was likely to assist timely scoping of weed burdens at a time when agronomists were “being stretched” to cover bigger and more complex inspection tasks on farm, and satellites gave the opportunity to outsource scoping to technology.

“This is more like see then spray.”

“We can have an understanding about which weed is in the paddock before we actually go out.”

Mr Neale said this enabled the tank to be filled with the right amount of product thanks to “the birds-eye view”.

“We can scout weeds cost-effectively now.”

Mr Neale said DataFarming’s weedSAT product was also working on applications in row cropping, including barnyard grass in sorghum.

“We’re not trying to compete with every other technology, just giving growers more options.”

“We can capture five to 10,000ha in a single go”.

“We’ve even got guys ringing us with four boom sprays, two with spot sprayers and two without, who are trying to make all four compatible.”

This is in contrast to drones, where scalability is “a real challenge”, in light of line-of-sight being a restriction for operation of drones.

“Most of our fields are 1.5-2km long now”.

While cloudy conditions can still be a serious impediment to image capture, Mr Neale said the greater frequency of capture opportunities, and the rising resolution, were both expected to heighten the usefulness of the satellite image.

He said two days used to separate satellite capture and DataFarming delivery of the file to the client.

“We’re now looking at one hour.

“Next year we’ll have 10cm pixel resolution”.

Earth’s first satellites went into orbit in 1960, and Mr Neale said the number of satellites orbiting the earth has doubled in the past two years.

“We’re talking to companies that will be imaging the earth multiple times per day.”

News from US

Charles Sturt University researcher Michael Walsh spoke via video link on novel US weed control technologies with potential for Australian cropping.

This follows Professor Walsh’s three months each at Kansas State University and Texas A & M under a Fulbright Scholarship.

Technologies scoped included WeedErase, a handheld non-chemical weed killer which uses a combination of blue light and mid-wave infra-red radiation, and the Weed Seed Destroyer.

The destroyer also uses blue light and MIR, but on chaff, and is undergoing scaled-system testing at the University of Western Australia on ryegrass in wheat chaff, with UWA also looking at targeted tillage.

“There’s good opportunity for (its) development here in Australia,” Prof Walsh said of the destroyer.

“I keep nagging these guys at (manufacturer) Global Neighbor that they really need to come and visit us here in the home of harvest weed-seed control”.

His time in the US also introduced him to micro jet sprayers, the subject of research at the University of California Davis, and North Carolina State University.

“It uses inkjet printer heads to deliver herbicide to plants instead of ink to cardboard.

Electrical weeding is also being investigated, with Sydney-based company Azeneo using pulsed electric fields that provide species-specific treatments.

The USDA is already funding the Getting Rid of Weeds, or GROW, team, which he said was investigating multiple new technologies aimed at better controlling weeds.

“Work in the US is rolling along quite rapidly on a large scale.”

 

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