Pushing the Profitability Margins
"Whether you think about using fewer people to do the same irrigation job, saving water due to higher irrigation accuracy, or not having to spend time and vehicle wear & tear driving around the farm checking fuel or water levels, INCYT helps us with pushing that profitability margin."
Size: 6,000 hectares
Type: Row Crops & Cattle
Crops: Cotton, Canola, Wheat, Oats, Durum
The mission statement of Carberry & Sons’ farming operation is to be a family farming business that wants to be sustainable and profitable. The family however was spending a lot of time and money on driving around their properties checking simple things like fuel levels, and channel levels. Because they couldn’t delegate these menial yet critical tasks to the rest of the team, this prevented them from being focused on higher-priority work instead.
Having always been early adopters of new technology, they decided to source a digital solution to counter this challenge. After looking at the different solutions available to them and speaking to their local experts at SierraTek, Narrabri, they decided to adopt INCYT technology as this would help them get all data from their weather stations, channel/dam level sensors and fuel level sensors into the same app.
Because the Carberry family now has access to remote monitoring data on all their devices, they can spend a lot less time driving around their farm and instead focus on important tasks at hand. This has enabled them to become more efficient, which results in improved profit margins. They also have the added benefit of having suppliers such as local fuel depots being able to access the same information, allowing the Carberrys to receive higher service levels by ensuring they always have enough fuel on hand.
A future-focused farming operation
Carberry & Sons is a multi-generational farming operation in Narrabri, NSW, currently run by 3rd generation farmers Andrew and Mike Carberry together with their sons Tom and Sam. When their (great) grandfather Stan came back to Australia after serving at Gallipoli during WWI he drew a soldier settlement block at Narrabri, which started the farming dynasty in 1920. Fast forward to 2024 and the family now farms around 6,000 hectares, with around 1,200 hectares of irrigated land, growing a mix of cotton, canola, wheat, oats and durum while also running a herd of beef cattle.
Digital technology has long played a role for the Carberry family, from being one of the earliest adopters of neutron probes in the 1980s to becoming one of the first active users of drones to create crop maps. Mike: “Agriculture is ever-evolving and, if you’re wanting to stay with the ‘moving beast’, you have to get the right tools to stay up to date and be as profitable as possible. In Australia especially, we are forced to be very efficient farmers. We don't get subsidised, we don't get any real handouts. So if you're wanting to push those profitability margins, you should really be looking at what you're doing efficiency-wise. And the only way to do that is with products like INCYT’s, that is for sure.”
Improving efficiency
One such example of achieving efficiencies on Cardale has been the adoption of INCYT’s fuel level sensors, says Sam: “We have so many tanks around the farm that, when we still used to send someone around to go and dip them all manually, it used to take a full day. And that also involves trusting that this person reads the stick correctly and then writes the corresponding level on the sheet correctly also. So, not an efficient process at all. With INCYT we now have access to all our fuel tank levels at any time, and so does our local fuel provider. Just the other day they called me to let me know they were coming past with 5,000 litres left in their tank from a delivery to CSD next door, and asked if we wanted to take that delivery as they could see that we had space in our tanks. So instead of us going out to manually to take fuel levels and then putting an order in, by using the INCYT app our fuel supplier can now pro-actively make sure that we don’t run out of fuel, which makes things a lot more efficient for us.”
Another example, says Sam, is the added efficiency during irrigation with the Carberrys now using INCYT’s water level sensors across their irrigated fields and channel system: “While we were irrigating this last summer we were able to do pipe work as well. With 2 of us needed on that job, working the digger and level stick, we never used to be able to do that during irrigating, as one of us would constantly be driving around making sure our water levels are all under control. Now that we have INCYT’s water level sensors mounted everywhere I’m able to see exactly what’s happening everywhere on my phone, and if something does need to be adjusted I can give clear instructions to someone else to ‘turn a wheel 2 turns for example’ so I don’t have to drive there myself. That’s the advantage of having level sensors and seeing a trend instead of just a point-in-time which only tells you how high the water is, not how quickly it’s rising or falling.”
Managing the most precious resource
With sustainability and profitability as the two key pillars of the Carberry family’s farming operation, managing water is always front of mind according to Mike: “ Water is ‘the big thing’ for us, it’s our limiting factor. So, when we look at our return on investment, return per megalitre of water is more important than return per hectare for us, because land is not what limits us in our production. When we think about pushing our profitability margins and where we can gain the ‘next 1%’ in our business, it doesn’t take long until we focus on our water. Sam ads: “When I think of sustainability, I also think of having a sustainable workload that we’re able to maintain next to our family life.
“When we’re irrigating at the height of summer, we often don’t have a lot of time for sleep - which impacts everything else we do. I used to wake up in the middle of the night and wonder whether I had to go out and check the water levels - and if you’re thinking about it, you might as well get up and check everything, otherwise you won’t be able to sleep again. With having INCYT’s water level sensors on our farm, I can now look on my phone and immediately know what the water levels are doing, which makes it easy to decide whether I can get some more sleep or if I should be out there managing the irrigation. This has definitely helped us get more peace of mind and more hours of sleep over summer, so I’d say that’s another way in which INCYT helps us make our farm and the way we operate more sustainable.”
Mike concludes with: “I think this is exactly why we decided that one of the first things we’d order from INCYT are water level sensors; we need all the help we can get with managing this precious resource. With inflation going up and the increasing costs we incur on almost everything that we buy, we have to keep working on increasing our yields as well as productivity to remain profitable and continue to push our profitability margins. And whether you think about using fewer people to do the same irrigation job, saving water due to higher irrigation accuracy, or not having to spend time and vehicle wear & tear driving around the farm checking fuel or water levels, INCYT helps us with pushing that profitability margin.”