Creating Full-Farm Visibility
“I don’t just want to be a client, I want to partner with our suppliers and with INCYT it really felt immediately like they wanted to form a partnership with me.”
Type: Livestock, Irrigated & Dryland Cropping
Crops: Cotton, Wheat, Barley
Ben Watson’s farming operation comprises three different enterprises: irrigated cropping, dryland cropping, and livestock, so any technology adopted by Allabah Pastoral needs to work for, and be accessible by, everyone working across the three different enterprises.This means that Ben had to find a provider that works across every type of farming operation.
After speaking to the different suppliers available, Ben visited the INCYT discovery centre when it came to Spring Plains for a local producer meeting. After seeing and feeling the quality of the INCYT equipment, and realising that this would allow him to get all information onto the same dashboard, Ben decided to adopt INCYT technology on his farm.
With having INCYT weather stations, rain gauges, soil moisture probes, pressure sensors, tank monitors, as well as channel sensors active across his farm now, Ben is able to monitor all critical aspects throughout the three different enterprises of Allabah pastoral. All staff are now also able to log-on to the same dashboard and have access to all the information they need throughout their day.
Six Generations of Progress
Ben Watson’s family started farming at Spring Plains, NSW in 1885, making Ben the 6th generation to own and manage ‘Allabah Pastoral’. What started as a predominantly sheep-focused enterprise, is now a diverse operation including developed irrigation with both pressurised overhead sprinklers and flood irrigation, grazing land, and dryland cropping. The irrigated property was only purchased in 2014, and has been a game changer according to Ben: “The dryland cropping and livestock are still very important to us as a business, but being able to irrigate crops has allowed us to get into cotton and other crops, as well as making us adopt more technology to manage this part of the farm, which has lifted the way we manage our business overall.”
With having three distinctly different enterprises, being able to adopt the right technology that benefits all enterprises equally without leaving one behind is crucial says Ben: “A lot of focus might be on irrigation right now, but dryland cropping and sheep are still very important when we stack all the numbers up at the end of the year. This is a big reason for why I want to partner with businesses like INCYT that are involved in all different aspects of my enterprise and are able to centralise all this information onto one dashboard for me. Being able to streamline data from across the different enterprises within Allabah Pastoral has been a passion of mine for a long time, and so dealing with a supplier that just focuses on irrigated cropping or just on monitoring stock water, is not an option for us. We rather bring it all under one roof and work with one business that provides us with one dashboard for everything we monitor.
Adopting INCYT
When INCYT’s Discovery Centre came to Spring Plains as part of the Farms of the Future roadshow, Ben was one of the producers in attendance. One of the things that stood out to Ben immediately he says is INCYT’s level of commitment: “Seeing them come to Spring Plains, being able to see and feel the INCYT equipment and the quality of it, and meeting some of INCYT’s staff, showed me that there is a strong level of commitment and that INCYT is here for the long haul, which is what we as farmers like to see. The equipment and how robust it is felt right immediately, and then the team followed up with me within a couple of days while still on their busy tour around New South Wales; being listened to and getting timely feedback is very important to me - I don’t just want to be a client, I want to partner with our suppliers and with INCYT it really felt immediately like they wanted to form a partnership with me.”
It wasn’t long after meeting the INCYT team at Spring Plains that Ben got his INCYT equipment installed across the three enterprises: weather stations, rain gauges, soil moisture probes, pressure sensors, tank monitors, and channel channers. Ben adds: “Because we got all equipment installed at once, it was easy to train all staff on INCYT at the same time as well. Everybody has a login and can see everything across all farms, so having someone move between enterprises is no problem; everybody has full visibility. If someone from the cropping side lends a hand to the livestock team, they don’t have to wonder what’s going on there: they look at the same INCYT dashboard and know right away what the level in each stock tank is for example. This to me is one of the big advantages that INCYT offers to our business: everyone in our organisation now has visibility across the whole operation, which is so important to keep us efficient as a team.”
Saving time
Although sensors don’t replace staff in farming operations, it certainly can make everyone more effective at what they do and give them the time to focus on other priorities. At Allabah Pastoral, Ben says that having INCYT installed across the operation is saving time in many different ways: “Instead of jumping in a ute and being gone for 40 minute to simply check a water tank, irrigation ditch or stock trough, this can now all be done from our phone. This is a big benefit to us and saves us lots of time and vehicle costs if you add all this up over a year’s time. And even at 10PM at night for example, instead of driving past full irrigation ditches in the dark and running an unnecessary risk, I can now be home with my family and just have a quick look at my phone to get the exact same information. This alone makes INCYT a tool that myself and our staff use daily.”
“Take a flowmeter or pressure sensor as another good example: having this information on the INCYT dashboard will show me immediately if a flow has gone over the limit, meaning that we might have busted a pipe, or if a pump might have stopped for whatever reason. This saves me a lot of time driving around and trying to find what the issue might be. By pinpointing the issue on the dashboard I know where to start looking first to rectify this issue. Ben continues: “With the way that farming is changing in Australia, and probably around the world, we are going to have to dedicate a lot more labour to tasks that traditionally we haven’t done in order to make sure we hit the environmental and sustainability marks that are required from us. We can’t have our head in the sand and ignore this, but we also have to remain financially sustainable - being able to replace labour with technology such as INCYT’s system means that we can redeploy this labour onto other priorities. So it’s not like we’ll be farming with our feet on the desk here soon, but with INCYT we can make sure that labour gets deployed to the most critical tasks instead of to simple tasks that can easily be replaced by technology.”