How AI could impact irrigation technology explored at Elders FarmFest 2024

Mr Loeskow was a guest speaker at Elders FarmFest 2024 Farming Forward: Elders Expert Speaker Series in Toowoomba, Queensland.

He presented a talk titled 'Learn about the Impact of Irrigation Technology'.

Mr Loeskow started off working with irrigation on his family farm back in 1980.

"I was on crutches, I'd just fallen off my motorbike on the farm," he said.

"My dad said to me 'well you're not going to have much fun over the Christmas break, so you may as well come to work'."

Mr Loeskow said driving farm efficiency had always been a key factor in the irrigation industry.

"Efficiency was a driver for the farmers, even way back in the 1980s, whatever they did, they wanted to get more efficient at," he said.

"The more even way to spread water across the field, the better results they got. That was seen as an efficiency gain. We weren't too worried about power back then because it was extremely cheap. Drip irrigation was fairly new."

Mr Loeskow said in many ways, operations had become simpler.

"Back then, the way to determine how much water you needed was done off how much rain you had in the rain gauge, you might go and dig a hole or kick the ground, that was your main way of determining when you next needed to irrigate," he said.

"With the irrigation management platforms we've got now, (there's so much) information we can get in from external sensors, whether it's soil moisture monitoring, or temperature, or water flow from flow meters.

"With water holding capacity in the soil now, we're using that in a way that we don't fill it right up but we put smaller amounts in more regularly so you're providing what the crop needs but leaving a bit there in the bank so if you do get rain events, there's more that you can use.

"We can even measure the sap flow in the plant and see when it's growing."

Mr Loeskow said technology had brought about significant benefits for producers.

"The ability to extend the irrigation day, and leave the automation to do it, that's had huge benefits to the grower," he said.

"The time you save out in the paddock, you can use back in the office to look at your inputs and fine tune your irrigation and fertigation processes.

"With the first platforms, if you bought a system from company A, you only had the sensors they had with their own system. With your modern platforms now, they can use whatever you have existing. As long as it's a measureable input, you can put it into the new system. Most modern stuff will graph it for you as well, so you have that historical data to say this is what you did on Block A or Block B. It's historical, it's quantative, so you can look at exactly how much water you put on."

Mr Loeskow believes AI could offer the next technological leap and change the way farmers go about irrigating.

"AI is something that we're going to have to deal with in the industry and I think it's actually going to be a good thing," he said.

"The more inputs we can put in and the more real time changes that we can get out of these systems, the better, so we're not working so much on the predictive based on what's happened in the past, but we're working on what's happening right now. We can then start to treat every plant as an individual rather than just a field. I think that'll keep pushing productivity up and up."

Mr Loeskow said promoting technological gains being made in the sector could be a way of attracting more people to work in the industry.

"We've got to attract people to the industry because a lot of kids coming through university, to attract them to our industry, we've got to make it exciting and new," he said.