Kyle Pearse explains his family’s new ag-tech to aid drought resilience

 

As part of its Farmer In Focus series, the Vic Hub’s North-West Node lead, Birchip Cropping Group, caught up with Kyle Pearse, a mixed cropping and sheep farmer from Donald who recently deployed a SwarmFarm Robotics autonomous spray unit to his farm to improve drought resilience by achieving better summer weed control and conserving more soil moisture.  

 

‘Our farm business prepares for droughts by conserving the moisture we get in summer periods.’

 

Q. Tell us about yourself and your farm. 

A. I’m a 5th generation farmer from eastern Donald. We farm wheat, barley, canola, lentils and a few sheep across 2800 hectares (mostly leased). On the farm, I work with my wife Teghan and my mum and dad. We also bring on casual staff in busy times.  

After school I did many different things before Teghan and I returned to the farm for the 2016 harvest season. We’ve been here ever since. 

Q. How did your 2024 growing season go, and how is harvest going so far? 

A. We’ve had a mixed season – like most. We didn’t get a great deal of in-season rainfall, so our crops relied on what we received in summer. Some of our crops tapped into the moisture and are looking good while others didn’t, and they aren’t looking so good. 

Our canola was hit hardest by frost and some of our lentils were frosted but recovered quite well. 

Q. We’ve heard the buzz about your new staff member, can you give us a bit of a rundown on the SwarmBot you purchased? What is it being used for on your farm, and why did you decide to go down this route? 

A. I’m part of an Australia-wide grower group, and we did a study tour in 2022 where we visited northern New South Wales and Queensland. Several growers throughout this region were using autonomous spray technology and hearing from their experiences sparked an interest for me. 

On our farm, we like to be conscious of our herbicide application. We have a bit of a reluctance to use particular herbicides, meaning that we can have weeds like fleabane and marshmallow growing in summer that haven’t been controlled in crop. 

We wanted to concentrate the chemical where it’s needed to get on top of those tough, hard-to-kill weeds, and we began exploring technology we could invest in. The cost to purchase a 60ft autonomous unit was similar to a 120ft towed unit, but the towed unit would also tie up a tractor that had another job to do – and I also don’t have to drive it. For the same price, I’d rather have something I don’t have to sit on. 

Q. What has worked well so far? Have there been any challenges? Have you noticed any immediate impacts on productivity, time savings, or cost efficiency? 

A. In the first paddock we sprayed with the SwarmBot, we saved $10/hectare in chemical, compared with the cost of a blanket spray. 

The SwarmBot finished a paddock last night and when I checked the tracking on my phone, I saw that it sprayed just 12% of the paddock, leaving 88% untouched by unnecessary chemical application. Besides the cost saving, I have concerns about what some of the chemistry we use does to the soil biology, nitrogen-use efficiency, our food system and the resulting resistance issues that come with excessive chemical application. I’d rather spray less of the paddock at a higher rate to concentrate the chemical where it needs to be. 

When we put the SwarmBot in a paddock, the paddock must be mapped out so that it knows where the obstacles are. I drive around with a RTK GPS receiver on the ute, mapping every power pole, tree, or fence line to ensure its smooth operation. In the first paddock I mapped I missed a tree, so instead of spraying around the tree, it detected an obstacle and went to sleep. I woke up the next morning and went to check on it to find it sleeping on the job because I hadn’t mapped it properly – but that’s the only real challenge we’ve had with the unit so far. 

Most of our mapping was done prior to cropping – in February or March, when there’s not much else going on. The idea is that once the headers are out of the paddock, the SwarmBot can go in to get started on our summer weed control and conserve any moisture left in the soil. 

The unit operates at a lower speed than a typical tractor and boom, but the 24-hour operation accounts for any lost productivity due to the reduced speed. It also has an on-board weather system, so if it starts to rain or the delta T is outside optimal parameters, it will stop and wait until the conditions are good. 

 

‘We’re certainly not the people to jump onto new things early, but this one I saw as a bit of a game changer. It fits really well with my ethos of good-practice farming.’

 

Q. How do you see the autonomous spray unit fitting into your long-term farming goals? Do you use any other technology on your farm? 

A. We are typically very slow adopters of technology. We’re certainly not the people to jump onto new things early, but this one I saw as a bit of a game changer. It fits really well with my ethos of good-practice farming. 

I have a gut feeling that in the future our grain will be marketed against our carbon footprint, and anything we can do to lower our CO2 emissions going forward will be beneficial in the long term. There’s been such a big push for the world to be cleaner and greener. I think as farmers, if we can show that we are being more efficient by only putting chemicals where they’re needed, that’s a step in the right direction. 

Q. What advice would you give to other farmers considering similar technology investments? 

A. My advice before making an investment in technology is to talk to people who are using different solutions to solve the same problem. I spoke to 10 people who were using SwarmBots, and I also spoke to people who ran tractor-drawn Weed-IT sprayers too. Listen to their experiences and their challenges and apply that information to your own situation to help guide your decision. 

For us, the technology aligns well with our values, and saves us money, so it’s a win-win! 

 

‘My advice before making an investment in technology is to talk to people who are using different solutions to solve the same problem.’

 

Q. Drought is an inevitable aspect of the climate we farm in. How is your farm business preparing for future droughts, or potential financial shocks within the business? Has the SwarmBot tied into this at all? 

Our farm business prepares for droughts by conserving the moisture we get in summer periods. This year is a standout example of how important it is to conserve any moisture we receive through out of season rainfall. Our main strategy for this is weed control and our SwarmBot will certainly play a role in that. 

Everything we do in farming we do with the understanding that we never know when it will rain or when it will frost. We place higher value on consistency rather than brilliance, and run a lower input, lower risk system. We don’t need to achieve a brilliant result in the great years but try to flatten the curve so that in the less favourable years our results are more consistent. 

Q. What are your plans for your farm in 2025 and onwards? Do you plan to do anything differently, or are there any new ideas you are hoping to implement?   

A. We try new things every year and 8/10 of them are unsuccessful, so I think we’ll just have a year off from doing stupid things. We might just try and copy the neighbours. 

 

You can learn more about SwarmFarm Robotics. 

 

This is an edited version of the original article on the BCG website.