🇦🇺 Thomas Elder Consulting: Applying Technology in Commercial Sheep Businesses

[Michael Wilkes]
I’m very honored to be asked to come and talk to you today about applying technology to international sheep businesses. The angle I’m taking on this is the angle I take as a TEC service consultant to sheep and cattle producers throughout Australia, specifically in Western Victoria and southeast South Australia.

Leading off, I just want everyone to have a think about what technology means to them. What is it? Is it management strategies? Is it flash gadgets? Just think about that as we move forward.

One way technology can be defined is: tools and equipment to collect information from our enterprises. Obviously this includes software to collect information and data and collate it. The other thing is management interventions. Strategy or infrastructure can also be classed as technology as well as we move forward and advance performance in our businesses. The other thing to think about is service provision and having access to people that are able to assist you to apply information and adopt practice change as well.

Why should we be looking to use technology in livestock production? Many people are a little bit apprehensive at first, because they think it’s actually going to replace people on the farm. That’s not the case. There has been some really interesting work out in the UK around producer attitudes to adopting technology. That’s largely one of the major drivers around outdating themselves or placing themselves out of business, but that’s definitely not the case.

Overall we have an increasing demand for food globally. Increasing demand for high quality, more consistent food. We have a climate that’s going to change and it’s our job to adapt and make decisions ahead of time, before those changes come. Land prices are increasing, so for those who are wishing to expand their businesses, it may not be as easy as buying the property. For young people trying to enter the industry, it’s certainly hard to come into enough land to pay your way. We’ve got to maximize efficiency of what we’re producing on the land we have.

Of course, now we’re facing more and more accountability from our consumers and various legislative entities within the industry for how we produce things. The management interventions and the treatments of our animals in its lifetime. The reality is we need to be able to be more accountable over time. The reality is that these factors will not go away and will continue to add pressure on us to tick off those boxes as well.

Another question is: are we utilizing technology well in our livestock production enterprises currently? It’s hard to pose questions virtually, but I’m just putting it out there and appreciate some feedback in the Q&A session at the end. We are facing challenges collecting information in extensive grazing systems particularly. We’re outdoors, we’re facing weather…climate extremes. Obviously we’re dealing with animals, and at times it’s hard to get them to be cooperative. Large extensive areas and we’re still faced with many connectivity issues, so it isn’t always possible to get wired up turn digital. But yeah, we do face these challenges. So they are worth considering. It’s a little bit of a cliche, but you cannot manage what you don’t know or aren’t able to measure. That’s something that I take into to my mindset when I’m thinking about applying technology into a farm business.

Another question for you: what is limiting adoption on the farm? What would be limiting you adopting change or technology on your enterprise? My take, from my observations in the industry and the experience getting around is particularly for new technologies. In order to be adopted at scale, they need to be well supported. The information that they’re providing needs to be easily interpreted and have a clear outcome and clear management decisions that can be made from that data interpretation. There needs to be a clear return on investment.

This picture here I actually pinched off a colleague of mine. His name is Craig who works with Thomas Consulting and actually shows you a Hereford steer with devices that were placed on the horns to help them grow straighter and stop them curling around. The return on investment for all that is unknown, but someone developed a piece of gear to do the job.

So any technology, management or equipment is only as good as the management decisions you make with the information that it provides. So it’s all very well to measure things, but if you’re not using it to make a decision and change the way you do things, then you’re not getting the most value out of it. That’s that’s that’s a high level sort of thing around roughly adopting whatever challenges to adoption. It really is that support and clearly defined return on investment which we need to really think about when we’re evaluating pieces of equipment and also when we’re looking at different options. If you’re a producer looking at options to implement it in your farm, that’s what you look at and if you’re developing a technology, think about that. If you’re providing advisory services, then really make sure the dollars and cents add up.

Moving into what technology do, and can we apply them to commercial sheep businesses? Obviously there’s a big focus on individual OD in sheep enterprises. It’s it’s met with mixed response throughout industries. In Victoria it’s compulsory, with other states likely to follow. This technology has been around for a long time and there are multiple different styles of tag. They have strong points and weak points. They are typically low frequency UHF reading on them. There is now some high frequency UHF tags available and some people are providing service around that. That enables us to monitor and capture data from animals remotely in the paddock, a bit more easily.

One of the things I want you to think about though, is that, outside of the stocking industry in beef cattle, we’ve had this idea in the industry for the last 20 years and largely it’s been very poorly adopted in commercial businesses to inform management decisions and drive change in businesses. It’s largely been for compliance and to contribute data to the database. It serves an absolutely brilliant purpose from the traceability point of view.

It baffles me, but it shows that without the tools, the equipment and software to collect, manage and interpret the data easily, we haven’t seen full scale adoption in commercial beef businesses to utilize the information that we could be capturing with our RFID tags. Moving into the sheep space, this is where we know to start about how we’re going to apply this. The reality is, it will become compulsory and there’s some awesome benefits from having individual identification of animals.

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To learn more about using technology on sheep enterprises, look at our sheep operations page.