John Deere - Precision Pays

Thanks for coming out, guys. Really appreciate it. I want to take the next two days to get to know you really well, get the opportunity to go and drive some nice new equipment, new technology. So what's the biggest barrier holding back your business? Entering into more precision ag.

Do we have to start with raymax? No, no, no. Vinny, Vinny, you can go first.

How's that going? Well, everyone's collect for the last 10 years. Some of us haven't maybe got time or whatever to actually put it into practice.

Is it worth sitting in front of a computer and working out what you're gonna change just to get such a small result back, or potentially a big one? Yep. Generations before us really put in the hard yards. They've made those gains, they've made the 20s and the tens and even the 5% gains. So we're just here trying to grasp at those 1 and 2% gains and sort of realise or work out what we can put our efforts into. The technology's there, but it's just getting it all to mesh together and easy. Like you should be able to just push button and then carry on. And if that paddock, you know what the yield think is going to be, we'll perhaps stop spending some money on it, spend it on the one out the back to try and maximise returns on some and perhaps minimise losses on other paddocks. What's going on as well as having your old man try and keep up with everything that's going on as well. You can sit in a tractor these days and there's that much gear in them, it takes a little bit to work out.

They can be fairly complex and complicated. You know, it's going back to a bit of training and that sort of stuff, so we can, you know, figure it all out and get it to work properly.

If we can't see that we're going to get value out of our investment, then there's really no point. We'll jump up in the sprayer and we'll go for a bit of a drive and show you how this exact apply works. Here we're spraying, so you notice your grass starting to go up. It's nice to see the exact apply. We're in very rolling country at our home farm, so to be able to see the rate control on the inner and outer sections of the boom was quite fascinating. Yes. Oh, yeah, I can see it there. You can see the pulsating as well with the sun.

Beautiful thing to drive with precision. You could actually map into your screens and do variable Rates with all that, because the machine can do it all. So I think for Precision ag, it's there for that machine. I did notice this machine's got this own little weather station on top of it and that's fantastic. You can just dial it in, touch.

It on the screen.

It was all there for you. Section control is a fantastic idea and if you're doing the hectares, the savings would be huge.

So I'll get you to jump up.

In there if you just let go.

Of the wheel there and hit your auto.

Hopefully we don't hit the fence.

I'm confident we won't.

If you're on the tractor for 15, 16 hours and you get a bit tired and you start missing turns and then that leaves a meter teardrop. Well, obviously that's where your weeds are going to grow, mate.

It's a. Yeah. Beautiful to ride in the way that the tractor is the same colour as the bin to the bar. That means they all talk very well together. What's this one over here? Do it. So straight through. No, I'm gonna go straight through the boundary. Yep. We probably don't want that in front of us at a few trees. It's a big thing in agriculture these days. You need to look very deeply into roi. Downtime is no good in agricultural business when, you know, we need to get crops in the ground. And time is money in farming too. So if you don't sow when it should have been, it can cost you a lot of money at harvest time.

I like how you have all the coverage but you still look out to see the colour of the straw, just to make sure you're in the right spot. Yeah, it's a very nice piece of gear. Wouldn't mind taking one home, actually. When you look at return on investment, we run two tractors. At the moment, we're looking at one tractor like the RX behind me, because it can do the job of two machines and just have one machine clocking up the hours for the 12 months of the year.

So how have you guys found the last couple of days experience?

Well, just for myself, mate, I think it's been really good just to see the new technology that's come out, whether it can improve what we're doing at home.

It's been good to get out of my own local area and talk to other farmers and then discuss issues. Something that would suit my farm back home in South Australia would be the turn compensation on the boom spray because we don't have regulation square paddocks and stuff like that. We've got a lot of creek climbs.

What's the one things that you sort of have seen over the last couple of days that you sort of look at your operation and go, well, that's something I need, or I'd like to look into further? Yeah. Applying fertiliser in the right parts of the paddock or, you know, parts that aren't doing it so well, or parts that are doing well. That's something, you know, to save money and costs, and that's big stuff. Now, with the amount of money we spend on chemicals in five or 10 years, that's the way agriculture is going to go. So that's the way as a business, our farm needs to be.