Fourth and fifth-generation farmers Darren and Gary Minter export almonds, citrus, and other crops to 30 countries. John Deere's AutoSteer and LiDAR sprayers cut their chemical use by 20-80% and reduced spray volume from 5-6 vats to 1. They're now eyeing autonomous tractors to tackle Australia's labor costs.
Chapters
My name is Darren Minter. I'm a farmer at Iorak.
Hi, I'm Gary from Minter Magic Farms.
I'm a fourth generation farmer.
I'm fifth generation for this farm.
This farm we're standing on now, we developed in 1966.
Minters have always owned it. We have a lot of pride in the place. As a kid, I was brought up in the kind of in the packing shed on farm.
He was the son that I always thought would be an accountant or something like that. He didn't pay that much attention to the farming and he went come home from school one day, I said, "We're going to go off to college," and he just said, "Dad, I don't really want to. I want to be a farmer." From that point on, we got out of asparagus, we planted more almonds, a bit more citrus. The father-son relationship's always been brilliant, but now Gary's really stepping up, taking over.
A day in the life of myself, we have a team meeting, team toolbox meeting for our H&S, and just general make sure everyone knows where everyone else is on the farm. There we delegate our jobs for the week. I run around, help set jobs up, and then and make sure the jobs are getting done. We have a management team of 4 people making sure that everything's done right.
This goes to the citrus packing plant in Wodura Fruit Company. There's 32 pictures taken of this one piece of fruit, and they roll it around and take it in about a second, and then that decides the size of it and how much blemish is on it. They're local and export. They go to about 30 different countries around the world, and every country wants its different size range and different grade. Beautiful. You see this orange, you'll never know where that'll end up. Somewhere in the world. People don't realise this, all our commodities, we're world priced. My price of almonds and American almonds, we're the same worldwide. So you have to be competitive and we are one of the dearest countries for labour, power and water. So we need every edge we can get.
With the adoption of the John Deere technology, I was probably not far out of school and we got introduced to a broadacre farmer who now works at the local dealership. Brought down his, our older unit that was actually the GPS system that John Deere used to use before RTK. We've seen how easy it was, so then we got involved in RTK and Starfire. So when we first started setting up the RTK, a person from the local dealership come down, he showed me how to calibrate it, he helped us set it all up.
Yeah, my name's Andrew Glare. I've been working with the Minter family since they've been working with John Deere, assisting our sales team with what the Minter family want to achieve in their journey with the product.
They were down here whenever we called them if we need them to be down here, or they explained over the phone as they're always only a phone call away.
How they've kind of transitioned their farm and looking at the efficiencies through the John Deere product is pretty amazing, really.
We run mainly John Deere, all sorts of jobs. We hedge with them, we mulch, hoe, weedicide, spray. We've got backhoes, we dig holes. Even our armored equipment has John Deere engines in them. John Deere is a very important part of our business.
Basically, the main fleet that our workers use are all the 6110M John Deeres. A lot of the 5 Series John Deere we have are forklifts. We use them a lot for our citrus harvest. We use a 5000 for our asparagus. That is a float tractor, so that will be used for multiple things. Obviously, we don't do asparagus all the time, so when it's not busy doing that, it's got something else on it.
The SmartApply system is unreal. I can't believe how they can do that. We bought a SmartApply because we put in 200 acres of new almonds, so we had a tractor go through with the same tank, same application rate, and it worked out that it ran for 2 hours. The SmartApply ran for 6 hours, so that was a huge saving.
Yeah, with the SmartApply technology, it's, it's got a LiDAR on the front, so it senses the canopy as it goes down the row and it'll spray what it sees. If it's not thick in density, it'll pulse spray.
With our standard fan sprayer, we're using about 5.5 to 6 vats compared to 1 vat when we had the SmartApply on. That doesn't just save us chemicals, that was time.
So we haven't done the exact figures, but I reckon we're saving 20% on our big trees. On our little trees, we're saving up to 80% to 60% depending on the density of the tree.
Yes, this is our latest planting of almonds. Yeah, we worked the land with some John Deere, then we've come through with the John Deere GPS and done a grid pattern. That's to mark out all our trees so they're uniform. It also helps us later on when we come to spray. We'll use that same GPS to come through and to spray the trees. With the marking out with the GPS, it's a lot more handy than having to get in surveyors and pay a lot of money to get them to individually do it, where this cross pattern, as you can see, is done. Beautiful spot, X marks the spot, and they know where to put the tree.
The John Deere AutoSteer system, the 2-centimeter, once we've got that in marking everything out— when I used to grow vegetables doing asparagus, we used it all the time. We're now getting the guys to use spraying and stuff like that because they find they don't have to concentrate on driving. They can actually look around and check to make sure the sprayer is working without worrying about where they're going.
We use Ops Center a lot for the alerts, so the alerts will come through if there's something wrong with the tractor that we can't see. It will come through and give us pre-warning. It also warns our local dealer in Mildura, and if we don't see it, they message us to let us know something's not right with the tractor. That's very handy because you can fix a problem before it becomes a problem. We also use the Ops Center to locate tractors. Like, we have them scattered through the farm sometimes, save driving all the way back, and we just know where they are at all times and how much fuel they've used. You can see all that all through the OpCentre.
What I'm looking forward to in technology, new technology with John Deere, is they're going to have the autonomous tractors here. With our climate of cost, we're the dearest wages in the world, and we really need this technology in this country as quickly as possible.
Other farmers I've spoken to have been quite hesitant in getting into the John Deere technology like SmartApply, the Ops Center. After talking to them, I think SmartApply is something that they're going to look into purely because of the savings we're making in everything from fuel to chemical, time. I think they'll eventually jump on board.
