[Light, joyful music plays]

Professor Salah Sukkarieh – Centre for Robotics and Intelligent Systems

Farmers in Australia have always been very innovative and also early adopters of technology and we're seeing that now in the phase with technology around the area of robotics, AI and intelligence systems.

They're adopting the technology in their operations and starting to see how it might work.

[View centres on a robot with ‘University of Sydney’ on the side.]

Ed Fagan – Managing Director, Mulyan Farming – Cowra, NSW

We're an early adopter of GPS technology when it came through and when I was looking at the vegetable industry, it's very labour intensive. Looking at the robotics, I see that we need change. We need to be more efficient. I could see that that's the way that that we wanted to head.

Prof. Salah Sukkarieh

So the focus of our robots is to be able to work on farm 24/7. In this case here, solar, electric.

We want to be able to move away from fossil fuels and in that collecting large amounts of data from different types of sensors and we use AI algorithms that they can then process that data and turn it to information that helps the farmers with per plant or per animal decision making.

John Said – Chief executive Officer, Fresh Select Australia – Werribee, VIC

What excites me about technology and smart farming is the fact that we've got now some line of sight towards having some more accurate data coming to us.

Robotics can help improve not just our business, but it can actually help improve the quality of food to consumers.

Ed Fagan

When Salah was bringing the robots to the farm, we worked in baby spinach that identifying weeds or anything that wasn't meant to be in that spinach crop.

John Said

It's not only scouting the crop for pest and for disease, it can also stop and take a soil sample or it can also identify a particular weed and micro spray it along its journey. So in essence, it's doing 4 different tasks in one pass.

Prof. Salah Sukkarieh

[Salah demonstrating the Digital Farmhand, as it navigates over a row of crops using a small nozzle to spraying weeds automatically.]

So, this is a digital farm hand. It was designed for smallholder farmers. It's an electric bot. It can operate between 12 and 24 hours depending on the terrain. And we can also adjust its width for different sized rows and that allows us to go to different farms.

We can do things like intelligent spraying and weeding as well, and we can put a number of different sensors underneath and that looks at the crops and we can then do crop intelligence with that.

They're being able to use AI techniques that can detect where to spray and what to spray and do that precisely. We think collectively that will help the environment.

Beyond that, one of the key areas is around selective harvesting, being able to determine what is the right thing to harvest at what point in time, and that will reduce waste into the future.

John Said

The reality of farming is that we've got an ageing farmer. The average age farmer in Australia is 60 years of age.

Ed Fagan

What we are seeing is that the number of people who are willing to do the medial tasks of actually picking fruit or picking vegetables is declining. The cost of them doing that is inclining and their effectiveness is declining. So, it's an exponential curve upward of the cost per kilo of what people are doing.

Prof. Salah Sukkarieh

And that's the kind of trend that we're seeing at the moment, now how can robotics help improve their profitability, their margins and in order to be able to work in this type of area, we need to be able to educate the next generation of farmer.

John Said

And I think with something like robots, we'll certainly make opportunities tomorrow a reality for different skill sets on the farm and a completely different opportunity to a younger group of people.

Ed Fagan

Although you'll have the technology throughout the farm, you will still need people with high education and you'll need people that actually have a knowledge and a passion that will be there to drive what's going on.

John Said

The financial stress around farming these days is really high. You know, the idea is, is to reduce that'll become more effective or more efficient. Robotics will play a great big part of that and will certainly help and go a long way in changing the face of what is such a labour-intensive and hand-me-down type of operation.

Prof. Salah Sukkarieh

This is ‘SwagBot’ built for the grazing livestock industry.

[A 4-wheeled robot navigates a pasture.]

It's a much more robust platform, can go through ditches, over logs, put sensors out the front that can monitor the animals as well as sensors underneath that can look at pasture quality measurement.

It's really great to see this technology in the hands of growers and see the potential it could do to transforming their lives. As well as seeing what the impact this technology has on the environment. Being able to maximise the potential for each particular plant or each particular animal and really putting efficiency and productivity back into it.

John Said

When you're working with individuals like Salah, it brings a different perspective.It brings hope. The progress that I've seen Salah and the team make has been quite remarkable in such a short time.

Prof. Salah Sukkarieh

Both John and Ed are strong advocates of automation and robotics and it's been really good working with them. We're facing many challenges in the future, environmental and how technology fits in our lives, and working with them into the future is going to be quite interesting because we're going to see transformation of the agricultural landscape with this type of technology on their farms.

John Said

I say keep bringing the technology, keep improving the skill sets, and let's keep building a very sustainable farming future.

Ed Fagan

I'm the fifth generation on this farm. I have children who will maybe one day be the 6th generation on this farm. I don't want to leave them with a whole lot of trouble.

Globally, we've got to feed 80 million more people every year off a declining amount of usable land in the world. And to do that, we have to look after the soil that's under our feet. Without building a sustainable farm, we don't have a future. The technology is emerging, and that time can't come soon enough for us.

[Engineering. Making life happen.]