Variable rate technology has been around for years but farmers rarely use it. This demo day shows younger growers how to collect data, integrate it into their machines, and what the economic payoff actually looks like through live seeder calibration and other equipment demonstrations.
Chapters
Sa. The technology of VRT has been around for a long time and farmers have been purchasing that technology for a long time. But the uptake in the industry has been quite slow and very small. So I think the purpose of the day is to better inform the farmers on where they can go to get the information to make the machines they pay a lot of money for to work and work in their favour. You know, input prices are going up, our variability is going up as we're chasing yields. So we're investing pretty heavily in the VRT space. We're not advanced as much as I'd like to be, but we're getting there slowly. And Dade lots day helps us point in the right direction of where we should be going and where to invest next and what we should be looking at. It's cost lots of money for some of these machines behind us. In order to make that decision, they need to understand how it works and what benefits that makes. So be able to inform them through talking to their friends, talking to experts. That decision is massively important for the farm. The young farmers want to know about how does it fit into my farming system? So that's the gap about showing them how important, how they can make money out of vrt. It may be fertiliser, it may be lime, maybe seeding, it may be herbicides. They can learn stuff they haven't learned before and they can all do it in a way that is meaningful to them. Trying to figure out where to start and what to do first is the biggest hurdle. Once you decide what you want to start on, then you can get a start and see how it works and then it just evolves from there. We reckon today will help them, is we're going to give them some background information from researchers on data and how to accumulate and use data, and then we're going to roll that into the machinery dealers on how you can plug that data and information into the machine and make it work. So hopefully there's a bit of a story through the day that'll help guys make their decision. I think as farmers we spend a lot of money on this machinery, so actually being able to see them before we buy them, because some of these bits of equipment now, it's getting astronomical how much we spend on them. So it's beneficial for us to actually be able to see them running so that we know what they're capable of and what we're actually going to use them for. You know, there's a tractor running behind me in the background. They're actually doing a demonstration on how to calibrate that seeder so we actually get to see how they actually work in the field. The main benefit of days like this is for growers to go home with the confidence that they can actually get into the new technology vrt. They know who to speak to, they know who to talk to to get information from, and they know the benefits, they know the economic benefits of actually undertaking vrt.
