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Every Australian cotton grower grows their crop differently, adapting practices to suit local conditions and optimised through years, or sometimes even generations of experience. What all cotton growers have in common however is the goal to grow as many bales as possible, as efficiently as possible. With a 60% increase in yield per hectare from 1997 and a nearly 100% increase in productivity per megalitre of water in that same time, both plant breeding and water management have played major roles in creating yield and productivity increases. So what is the next big challenge for one of Australia’s most innovative industries?
Most cotton growers that I speak to tell me that increasing labour efficiency and decreasing the need for seasonal labor is a challenge they continue to work on in order to keep optimising profitability, whilst maintaining a core focus on yield. Having been part of the cotton industry for nearly 15 years, with Cotton Growers Services and Bayer, I’ve discussed the ‘how to’ of increasing labour efficiency with growers for many years, but recent advances in technology are certainly speeding this process up.
One of the reasons why I recently joined INCYT is that I’m very excited about the current and emerging technology that will enable growers to further optimise their operation. For those of you that don’t know INCYT yet: INCYT is an innovative Australian Company with a long heritage in industrial product development that has set ambitious goals to partner with the cotton industry to deliver the next generation of robust monitoring and control systems. The INCYT platforms “data cockpit” provides a single portal for monitoring and controlling your operation.
INCYT’s trackers, sensors and network equipment capture important data so growers can confidently manage more land with less staff. Irrigation monitoring, fuel reorder automation, spray condition monitoring and a CRDC-backed spray-advisory system (including localised inversion data), pump control and monitoring along with traditional soil moisture, weather and tank monitoring - all of this information and more displayed in one app and on the same dashboard. Network connectivity is no longer a problem with INCYT, opening the door to on-farm remote sensing even for growers in the most remote areas without phone signal.
Knowing what’s happening on your farm at a glance and making the best possible management decisions for your crop is key to improving productivity and, as INCYT client Ben Swansbra from Wee Waa recently told us: “Having INCYT saves days, literally days during the season; it just frees your mind up so that when you’re at home, your mind’s at home too.” Not having to drive around endlessly checking fields, channel levels, pumps and everything else, but having all this information live on your phone or computer, makes a massive difference to growers like Ben and many others.
While INCYT’s parent company, LX Group, has been around for nearly 20 years, INCYT was launched as an agriculturally focused technology company only 5 years ago - when it needed one specific industry to focus on, it’s no surprise that the cotton industry was chosen. What better industry to partner with when you want to work together with forward-thinking growers to drive innovations that lead to efficiencies for the whole farming system?
I’m very excited about what INCYT offers to cotton growers now, but it’s the direction INCYT is headed that has me most convinced that this will form a big part of how we as an industry can overcome our next challenge and increase our productivity. With on-farm monitoring a reality on a lot of operations already, the next logical step will be to move from just ‘remote monitoring’ to controlling’ and ultimately, in the near future, “automation”, with INCYT’s recently released pump control system a small sign of what’s to come…There are going to be some exciting next steps in our industry’s journey and quest for increasing labour efficiency!
This article was first published in the Australian Cotton Grower Magazine June/July 2024 edition.
