Embracing Technology
“If you want to get ready for the future, you have to adopt the right technology now, and for Dunedin Pastoral the right technology is INCYT.”
Type: Dryland and Irrigated Cropping
Crops: Cotton, Wheat, Barley, Canola
Size: 4,000 hectares
Bill Ferguson has used on-farm monitoring equipment from several providers over the years, however the equipment from some providers didn’t work well and another provider cancelled their services altogether, leaving Bill with a failed $50,000 investment. Having been ‘turned off’ from working with many providers, but not from the solution that this equipment offers, Bill knew that he needed to find a reliable partner to work with instead.
In early 2023 Bill and his daughter Milly got introduced to INCYT at CSD’s ‘Growing Better Cotton’ series event in Dubbo. After seeing the equipment and INCYT’s presentation by Managing Director and Founder Simon Blyth, and hearing his vision for the future, Bill and Milly decided to start implementing INCYT devices on their farms. They started with weather stations, an inversion tower, soil moisture probes, water level and diesel tank level sensors.
With multiple properties over 40km apart, INCYT channel level sensors enable the team to save time and money by not having to drive around unnecessarily conducting visual checks on water levels. They are also able to better prevent water backing up on their irrigated cotton crop by knowing exactly when to make an irrigation change. The ability to make data driven decisions and having an aide to get the timing right to do this can prevent a costly error. Through INCYT’s soil moisture probes, the Ferguson family can accurately estimate crop water use ratios, and use this information to help them optimise their water use efficiency, which in turn increases productivity.
Working with a trusted partner
Bill took over the family farm in 1995, and he bought his first Outback GPS guidance system in 1999, so AgTech and being an early adopter is nothing new to Bill. Bill knows exactly how new technology can revolutionise the way he farms, but he’s also experienced the negative sides of adopting new technologies early on: “I had used soil moisture probes and other monitoring equipment from a couple of different providers, but none of them were easy to work with and I just wasn’t getting the information I needed to make the improvements I was chasing. Then, to top it all off, I invested $50,000 with a soil moisture probe provider who then pulled the plug on their whole offering 8 years later, leaving me with useless equipment and 8 years’ worth of data that I can no longer utilise. That’s a bitter pill to swallow and it really knocked back my confidence in starting to work with another new supplier to be honest.”
Bill did keep on looking for potential new organisations to work with for on-farm monitoring solutions however, and when he and daughter Milly went to Cotton Seed Distributors’ ‘Growing Better Cotton’ series event in Dubbo, they got introduced to INCYT explains Milly: “We got to meet Simon (Blyth) and see his passion and vision for the company, which immediately got us interested. Then we also saw that everything is on the same platform, from soil moisture probes to weather information, channel sensors, fuel level sensors, etc. Our team really can’t cope well with the plethora of logins and passwords that they have to use sometimes, so the more we can combine things on the same platform, the better it is for us. And this concept really sold it to us, because I knew then that I could ‘sell’ INCYT internally without getting the resistance I would otherwise. One of our big struggles is to get our farm managers to collect data, but with INCYT this has been made so easy - so we decided to partner with INCYT at that point.”
Bill: “The INCYT team have been great partners for our business: we’ve had excellent service from the field support team and were even invited to visit INCYT’s head office in Sydney to meet the team and see the projects that the engineering team is working on. Every farmer knows how important customer support is, and INCYT’s is top-notch.”
.avif)
Saving time and money
Optimising their farming operation by increasing yields and keeping costs down where possible, is top of mind for Bill and Milly, the same as for most producers in Australia. Cutting out unnecessary traveling has been one of the savings that Dunedin Pastoral has achieved with INCYT, says Bill: “Because we flood-irrigate our fields, we have to keep track of our channel levels at all times. Instead of just driving back and forth between farms and fields, which costs us time, fuel and wear & tear on our vehicles, we are now able to track our channel levels with INCYT and we get an alarm when a specific water level has been reached. This means that we only have to drive to a channel when we know there’s something we need to do to change the channel level, and don’t have those unnecessary trips anymore. And we haven’t even talked about the yield loss because of over-irrigating yet, one mistake can be very costly - so using INCYT’s remote monitoring to prevent this, is a no-brainer to me.”
Milly adds: “Fuel is a big cost to our operation and with INCYT we’re able to optimise it as much as possible. We have identical diesel pumps running for example, and we can see exactly how much water flow they’re generating with INCYT, but also how much fuel they’re consuming through the diesel tank level sensors. We noticed that one consumes more diesel than the other, which then gives us hints as to where we need to start looking for our next cost saving exercise. Should we run both pumps at lower RPMs, or one pump at higher RPMs for example. With running a pump an average of 4,000 hours per year, being able to save 5 litres an hour is a lot of money, and because we’re monitoring everything with INCYT we now know where to start looking for these kinds of savings.”
.avif)
Getting ready for the future
In most businesses change is the only constant, and farming is no different - which is why Bill and Milly feel that to get ready for the future, they must get ready for it today according to Bill: “The world will keep on changing and you have to accept that, you’re not going to stop it. So you’re either going to get ahead of it, embrace it, and work out how best to run your business, or you just keep doing what you’re doing until you’re overtaken by reality. If you don’t use technology to make better decisions and you think you’re going to keep doing it the way you’ve done it for the last 30 years, I think you’re just going to fall further and further behind.”
Milly: “Take tractors as an example: in the next 5 years there can be 25 to 50% of tractors running autonomously. So if you’re buying a new tractor now, that’s something that you need to have in the back of your mind that this machine can do what you need it to do moving forward, or you’ll be in for a massive upgrade to move into that new phase of technological adoption. The same principle applies to INCYT’s technology: if you don’t think about the future now and don’t adopt the technology now that you’ll need in future, you just make things harder for yourself down the track. You’re not establishing a baseline of data and you won’t have the right technology in place yet in future, which means that your costs to get with the program at that point in the future can be higher than you can afford and so you’ll fall behind. If you want to get ready for the future, you have to adopt the right technology now, and for Dunedin Pastoral the right technology is INCYT.”