Tim and Luke Reethus, third-generation farmers in the Wimmera region, use John Deere precision agriculture technology to manage diverse crops and handle labor shortages. Digital tools help them make better decisions and stay flexible as their workforce changes.
Hi, I'm Tim Reethus, I'm part of the Rethus family.
This is Jeff, Luke, my brother.
And we've been farming in the Wimmera since 1947. Grandpa moved down from a little bit further north to focus growing better crops and getting more pasture free sheep. He was quite an innovator and he had a few boys and two of them, dad and my uncle took over the farm and grew the business quite extensively. And Luke and I are the third generation. We took over about 10 years ago and we've been working with dad now as our wise owl to help us get through the business. And we've been expanding it steadily too, working in partnership with John Deere. Our farming in the Wimmera here, it's a very diverse area. We grow wheat, barley, canola, lentils, we can do peas, we can do chickpeas, huge diversity of rotation. So it's really good for our soil and sustainability. Precision Ag is about taking some of that subjectivity out of your business decisions. So we're using it to make scientific based decisions with the real true data that we're getting out and that's making our job easier. It's obviously reducing conflict because you can't argue with the data and it's making, I think our business more sustainable.
Well, I think we've been able to be more proactive in our business. The tools allow us to see what's going on and help us make decisions for the next time and for the next day.
And it's so flexible for so many different types of farms. It's not just grain farms like ours. You can do it with a cotton farm as well.
One of the challenges we're finding in this area particularly, and probably across a lot of farms, is labour. It's challenging to get skilled labour to do a lot of the farm sort of activities these days. They've become a lot more involved and therefore we need particular people which are hard to get. The digital tools are allowing us to help those people get into that role a lot easier and do what they need to do and be able to be supported by us easily. Where we can use the operations centre, for example, log in remotely, give them direction and even simplify even their tasks.
Yes, that Precision Ag is giving us flexibility in our workforce selection. The digital tools allow us to micromanage every hectare. By being there for us, we.
