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I have had a few conversations around agtech this year & there has been some discussion more broadly particularly from government as to why there hasn’t been greater uptake. I wouldn’t consider our business a laggard & occasionally we’ve been at the bleeding edge which isn’t fun.
I would like to offer a bit of insight from this week where things have been busy but not ridiculous & where agtech has been the pinch point
Firstly the on header protein analyser we bought 3 harvests ago. It hasn’t worked at all from new. Given the previous 2 seasons I assumed it was dust & light crops causing the issue. Turns out it was never fitted properly & I’ve been working with the manufacturer to get it going
We got 3 days out of it & then it stopped & now it’s going again, not sure why. The calibration is out but the pressure of harvest doesn’t put it at the top of the priority list when other machines are broken down.
Then we’ve added a new chaser bin this year with scales. I’m told by the dealer it’ll work out of the box. That is unless you want a weight that makes mathematical sense based on volume & test weight. Then proper calibration requires a Truckie willing to be patient &/or
Potentially under loaded to do an accurate calibration. Add to this I am the individual in our business whose responsibilities cover both sowing & managing tech. We’re presently m sowing. So tech isn’t all that high on the priority list when put up against harvest & sowing.
As a couple of sweeteners the planter after checking was good to go & all green lights in a pre start check throws a wobbly & can’t communicate with 1 row unit. So after an hour of swapnostics & another hour working it through with the dealer on a Sunday evening & we figured out
the monitor can function & planting can commence despite the system not operating as designed. (Swapnostics & creativity for the win). Add to that a dickie speed feed for my rate controller so it’s presently operating in fixed speed mode. This is one week & not an outlier.
#agtech is rarely seamless or easy. I don’t post this to can all agtech clearly I see value as I keep suggesting to the business to buy it. But it comes with a sweet of issues from reliability, interoperability & back up to name a few.
And all this is invariably happening when the data points you’re trying to collect or the job your trying to do a bit better are the things that pay the bills & could be progressing with an analogue or mechanical system you could fix yourself.
Unfortunately I can offer few if any solutions to this, but I know at least Nsw govt are throwing money at this question. So here’s a bit of unsolicited feed back.
