A NUFFIELD scholar has had a glimpse of tomorrow's agriculture.
Is precision Agriculture about to take the next step and have robots planting, spraying and harvesting crops?
This is one of the questions grain grower James Hassall was keen to answer as part of a Nuffield Australia Farming Scholarship.
In the past 12 months, James has toured Europe and the US, discovering what is possible with the latest computer technology and how it may be adapted to Australian conditions.
Could we see herbicides being printed directly on to the leaves of weeds or a roaming robot that seeks out weeds, sprays them then meets the farmer at the gate when it need refilling?
James manages his family's 2200ha farm near Gilgandra in NSW, cropping winter cereals, oilseeds and legumes using no-till and precision agriculture techniques.
He said a key part of his tour was understanding developments with global position systems that drive so much of precision agriculture.
"A great deal of effort is going into increasing the accuracy of GPS and to set up independent testing for the accuracy of auto-steer vehicles," James said.
"In the not-too-distant future, the location of vehicles could be available in real time over the internet."
He said agricultural equipment manufacturers had pledged to standardise their electronic communication systems.
"This means complete compatibility, regardless of the brand of tractor, auto-steer software or variable-rate air seeder," James said.
"Implementation should happen within five years, and once it does, it should be relatively simple to send all the data together via the internet."
James said advances in spray technology were promising to dramatically cut input costs.
"In Denmark, they are in the early stages of developing a system which uses a commercial bubble jet printer to print chemical directly on to the leaves of weeds," James said.
"They are getting effective control using only 1 to 5 per cent of the label rate, which makes a big difference to the cost, even compared to WeedSeeker technology. (WeedSeeker uses infra-red sensors to distinguish weeds from bare ground or stubble).
"It also means, potentially, the end of spray drift."
Equally exciting was the development of cameras and a video detection system that could identify the species of weed and match the application rate accordingly.
James said some of the automation techniques being investigated by the European Union's Future Farm research project were mind-boggling, if they could be all put together.
"Imagine a small, solar-powered device about the size of a ride-on lawnmower to avoid compaction issues," he said.
"When fitted with a microspray unit, it could spend all summer searching for, monitoring and controlling weeds. As well, it could map the species and densities and send them to the office computer and your mobile phone.
"It could send you a text when it ran out of chemical, which would not be often using the Danish technique, and then meet you at the gate."
James said he was keen to continue to learn about precision agriculture and to get some of these ideas off the ground in Australia.
He will also be making presentations to events for Nuffield and the GRDC in coming months to share his knowledge.
