Hi #SmartCommunity friends, welcome back to the Smart Community Podcast and this month we are highlighting Smart Regions with two fantastic guests. First up is Tim Neale, the co-founder and Managing Director of agtech company DataFarming. We first had Tim on the podcast in Episode 308 in August 2022. Then we featured Tim again in our recent Summer Series so we knew we had to get him back on the podcast.

In this episode, we get a little update from Tim about what he’s been up to since we last spoke. We talk about how much and how fast satellite technology is improving and the many ways the data can support farmers in making better decisions and increasing yield, efficiency and sustainability on farms. Tim shares how a number of macroeconomic factors globally are having big impacts regionally for farmers in Australia, and we discuss the opportunities and challenges of our interconnected and interdependent world. Tim then tells us about some of the new projects his team is working on, including using data to help farmers demonstrate the sustainability of their operations, and an investigation into the long term performance of Australian farms. We talk about the impacts of weather and climate change not only on farm production but also the mental health of farmers and rural communities, as well as the big problem with connectivity and access to communication technologies in regional and remote areas.

We finish this episode discussing the emerging trend of robots and automation being used on farms and how technological innovation can solve agricultural problems. As always we hope you enjoyed listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it!

Listen here: 

What we cover in this episode:

• About Tim’s company DataFarming
• What’s changed since he was on the podcast last year
• What a Smart Community means to Tim
• How much and how fast satellite technology is improving
• The ways data can support farmers in making better decisions and increasing yield, efficiency and sustainability on farms
• How macroeconomic factors globally are having big impacts regionally for farmers in Australia 
• The opportunities and challenges of our interconnected and interdependent world 
• Some of the new projects Tim and his team are working on
• Using data to help farmers demonstrate the sustainability of their operations and investigating the long term performance of Australian farms
• How hungry farmers are for data and information to improve their work and their lives
• The impacts of weather and climate change not only on farm production but also on mental health of farmers and rural communities 
• The big problem with connectivity and access to communication technologies in regional and remote areas
• The emerging trend of robots and automation being used on farms 
• How technological innovation can solve agricultural problems

Quotes: 

“[A Smart Community] is being able to do the sort of things that we do in terms of big data and analytics and software development in regional areas. To me, it’s too often the vacuum cleaner that is Sydney and Melbourne consumes all of those types of skill sets. Being able to have those opportunities in those regional areas is fantastic.”

“We’ve been working with technology like satellite data for 20 years. But it’s been in the last 5 years where we’ve seen this massive acceleration. So we deliver now a European Space Agency product to farmers across Australia every five days. And it comes from a web application.”

“Often we see up to 300% variation in yield across those fields. So the satellite image is in real time, and it’s actually picking up things that you can’t see with your eyes. So it actually enables you to go and really sample and scout properly, to understand what’s driving that difference [with a] really good bird’s eye view to help with that.”

“These sort of macro pressures, like Ukraine, like the impacts of COVID, are still filtering through and have had an impact at a farm level. So we’re continually getting asked how can data help manage that and improve efficiencies, improve profitability for growers, because of these macro economic pressures that are coming.”

“We’re actually about to launch a sustainability token, which we’ve underpined with Blockchain. But it’s all the data to prove that farm is actually operating sustainably.”

“People want more information, their farm size is getting bigger, they’re having more trouble managing all this and staff resources are still a huge problem. So people just don’t have the resources that they have at their fingertips to actually manage this. So I think data is going to fill the gap to help manage properties at the scale we’re talking about. Farm size has doubled in the last 30 years in Australia…and just a gradual decline in numbers of farmers is still happening. And technology is going to fill the gap. So people are thirsty for this kind of information.”

“The number of hectares in Australia will never get any bigger. What we’re farming today is pretty much what we’re always going to be farming…so we’ve got to make more use of those 30 million hectares, and grow more out of them to feed a growing population, and we’re going to do it more efficiently and more sustainably. So the pressure is on!“

Links:

Are You Bogged Mate mental health information for farmers 

University Southern Queensland, Toowoomba

Swarm Farm

Connect:

Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community 

Connect with Tim via LinkedIn or Twitter 

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community  

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital