Lessons in frustration, improvisation and unexpected outcomes

Ian Layden
Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, Queensland

It’s widely promoted that precision agriculture (PA) has the potential to offer producers a myriad of exciting opportunities for improving crop performance and ideally profits. However, the reality seems to suggest that in order to unlock any significant benefits a lot of work and importantly knowledge generation will be required.

Arguably, progressing PA in vegetable systems will require producers, consultants and R&D providers to accept technology and systems that aren’t fit-for-purpose and the numerous obstacles that exist in terms of equipment compatibility, data processing and management, service and support and whether the return-on-investment (ROI) outweighs the costs.

Despite the numerous reasons not to invest and adopt PA practices, vegetable producers and agronomists have achieved a number of essential adoption milestones, though typically this hasn’t been easy or straightforward.

Recent work in Queensland suggests that the adoption of advanced PA technologies and practices (e.g. crop sensing, yield monitoring, soil mapping and variable rate applications) is occurring, though often the process and outcomes are either unintended or unexpected. This work also indicates that diverse relationships and delivery methodologies may be required if industry wide adoption of PA is to occur.

This presentation used examples from the process of optimisation and validation of PA in vegetable systems in Queensland including producer and consultant survey data. The presentation also used examples from outside agriculture to illustrate that through experiencing difficulties and failures actually may improve the adoption process. This has implications for producers, consultants, investors, program managers and policy developers.