Cultivate-Agri’s Post

Transcript

Precision agriculture. It's obviously everyone's talking about it, everyone seems to want to know about it, but from what I see is no one actually seems to know how to use it. In terms of as a concept, obviously Broad Acre has been doing precision agriculture for some time, taking advantage of the satellite images, the fact that got big machines, they have differential GPS on them and obviously they can guide those machines down into specific locations. And the question I look at is how can we do that in palm oil. Everyone talks about it. We've got guys going around selling drone services and satellite services. But again, how do we take it to the next level of use it? And if you look at Palmer States, it's pretty hard to have, say, big boom spray that's, you know, doing 4050 metres in one spray and having devices that are actually targeting specific areas because you just can't fit a 40 foot boom spray down the center. But when you look at it from precision perspective it that we especially with palm oil. I look at it today and say most guys will tell me we do it by block or sub block and it works and and that's what they want to go to and I I think that's fine. I think up till today though there is still a lot of benefit we can gain from per block or or per sub block and getting fertilising and weeding accuracy yield forecast down to that level. The real question is once we've actually done that and today we can do that because previously we've got all this data but we can't. Process the data. Nowadays with systems like Cultivate and another of course smart farm practices or farm management systems, that data can be collected, it can be processed, can be analyzed and it can be done quickly. So we are now seeing the fact that the data or volume of data is no longer the obstacle or barrier to entry. What really is now that we can capture the data? It's about how do we capture it, How do we get that level of accuracy. And one of the things we're suggesting in palm is that we can actually take it down to real precision agriculture, real tree level because at the lowest level in palm, it's the tree. So if we can tag trees, get geolocation for trees and then start recording things on a tree basis, we get a lot more accuracy in the information that we're getting out. So things like we can do true cost per tree because what we can do is we can at the yield coming off the tree. We can basically scan a tree, get the number of bunches, workout how many bunches per tree we can workout which trees are barren and which ones are producing high volumes, which are producing low volumes. And then of course, what we can start doing is plotting that over time. And that will give us the effectively an oil curve on a tree basis. Now again, I'm not promoting that everything is looked at as a true level. What I would say is that once you've got tree level data, we bring that up a level which is congestive or at least consumable by us humans in terms of heat maps and things like that. And realistically that's where I see precision agriculture going with palm oil where the days of just fertilising entire blocks will disappear, we will be fertilising. Sections within a block where we if we have irrigation in some of these farms, or fertigation where we'll target specific areas of fertigation and irrigation. So to me precision agriculture in in palm oil is actually relatively simple thing to do. It doesn't require all the expensive equipment and precision agricultural equipment that gets it right down into you know per centimetre. What we've got to get to is per tree. And tagging those truths of the geolocation is the first step. Once we've got that, it's recording data on that level. Once we've got that, then we've got history. Then we can start doing analysis. And for me, that's precision agriculture in palm oil.