🇦🇺 Webinar: How Australia Leads Innovation in Agriculture
[John Fargher]
Well, good afternoon, everyone and welcome today’s panel on leading livestock enterprises across Australia. Thank you all for joining and of course, thank you to our panelists for joining us. We will do some introductions shortly, but first of all, my name is John Fargher. I’m one of the co-founders here at AgriWebb. I’m joined by my colleague Bruce, who looks after the Australian geography for us. By way of a quick introduction, I personally grew up on a sheep and cattle station in Northern South Australia. I’ve always been really passionate about livestock and agriculture, but also bringing innovation and technology. Particularly to larger scale types of enterprises. I guess for me, when I look back at what my father and grandfather were doing in the 50s and 60s and 70s, we saw a fundamental shift in what was literally everything run by horses. They had a staff of 40 shift to motorbikes and eventually into an airplane. There were some fundamental shifts from when it would take literally a month to muster a paddock to a number of hours. Those were some amazing transformational shifts in the way we were running our business. When we look back now in the last say, 10, 20, 30 years we haven’t seen any of the same fundamental steps changing, and we see this globally. We see the livestock industry being the least digitized industry in the world. There are some great opportunities there and we’re really seeing a lot of change in the last five years with investment in innovation, a lot of change and technology is a big piece of that. We’re really excited to host today’s session and now we’ll give you a quick introduction.
[Will Bruce]
Thanks John. It’s so great to be on the webinar this afternoon and by way of introduction. As John said, I look after the Australian business here out of Sydney–I’m a long way from home–after multiple generations farming in the UK; in Kent, southeast England I joined AgriWebb in 2018. After 10 years originally working at PwC in London and then lately for a big multinational software company, I made the move down South mainly because of the opportunity (as John has just talked about) and the fact that this is an industry that I’m passionate about. From a technology perspective–through no fault of its own– it has been grossly neglected in many ways–as John talks about–for the last, you know, 10, 20, 30 years. We’re here to provide a solution and that innovation that we’re going to talk about today to the industry as a whole. It’s great to be on. I’m really excited for the next 90 minutes and looking forward to hearing from everyone that’s joining us across the country.
[John Fargher]
Absolutely. Before we run some intros across our panel…for those of you who are not familiar with AgriWebb, we are a livestock management platform that is servicing customers all across the world from Australia. We look after about 5,000 customers, about 12 million head that that we currently manage and we have a large focus and support a lot of large organisations across Australia. We are joined by three of them today, which is really exciting and it’s great to see a number of our clients also listening in. Hopefully we can have a shout out to them later. It’s really exciting to bring this session to you all today. Please feel free to flag questions through in the Q&A section at the bottom, and you can also vote for your preferred question if you want to get that one answered.
Without further ado I might hand it over to our panelists to give their name, what they do at their organization, and what innovation in livestock enterprises means to them. Anthony from Paraway Pasture, I’ll hand it to you.
[Anthony Chambers]
Thanks John. Thanks for having me on today. I’m Anthony Chambers with Paraway Pasture Company. I look after technology for the company across infrastructure and service management and our connectivity to the stations. I’m in charge of what technology we use to support our business and then–of course on farm–and the production technology that is used across all our stations across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.
I’ve been at Paraway for just on 18 months now. Prior to that I was in consulting. I worked for one of the Big 4 consulting firms. I was really focused on private equity clients, investment management clients, technology and corporate operations, particularly around strategy, transactions and then also business transformation. Prior to that, I have a background in financial markets and technology. I’m hugely passionate about agriculture. AgriWebb is a combination of bringing together agriculture and technology which is why it’s great to be here today.
[John Fargher]
Thank you, Anthony. You and Will broke out of the big Four; broke out of the finance game and saw the light to come back to Ag. I think it’s a trend we are seeing, which is really exciting. Dan, do you wanna give a quick intro?
[Daniel Hough]
Yeah, you can put me in the bucket of breaking out of what was then called the Big 5. My first job out of university was with Arthur Andersen, which did not survive Enron, but yeah, I then moved into corporate finance and agriculture about 12 or 13 years ago from a corporate point of view originally in Africa. I then spent four years at Macquarie, based in London and then formed Gunn Agri Partners in 2013 with two of my Macquarie colleagues. I grew up on a mixed cattle and cropping operation in northern New South Wales. I saw first hand some of the things John just mentioned. My Dad is on his farm at the ripe age of 75. He has never owned a mobile phone, so there’s a real lot of low hanging fruit in the sector. Just the changing age demographic of farmers we find really exciting.
We (Gunn Agri) currently manage about $225 million of assets in our first strategy. Which is a grass fed cattle operation. We use our group in that operation to run about 70,000 head […] all in Queensland. We’re also a farm management business working on a greenfield development and we’re also transforming to a mixed farm strategy as we speak.
[John Fargher]
Thank you, Dan. You raised a good point around the average age of farmers…not just in Australia but basically across the world. One thing we are seeing sitting here in a virtual world is that the age of digital Ag is definitely here. COVID has driven that. We used to spend a lot of time on the road with clients training them on the farm. Now our big clients are able to move into a digital world and hundreds of people sign up for an event like this. It is really, really exciting and a big step forward for the industry. More to talk about there.
Bill, we’d like to hear from you.
[Bill Cameron]
Thanks, John. Thanks, Will. Thanks very much for having me. I’m an asset performance manager at AAMIG. I grew up on a cattle ranch as well. I studied industrial design at uni. Then I started my first job out of university in this business a number of years ago when it was in the livestock exchange side of things. I stayed for a couple of years there and then got into software. I started a software business around early childhood education, which was a bit different. I got that up and running and then worked for the development company that built that. I ended up being manager of that team and what that involved was consulting and working with businesses and startups to understand the revenue they’re trying to achieve with that technology and putting together a solution to make what they’re looking for.
Back to that experience in design and really understanding the user’s needs, I think that’s served me pretty well through that process and that’s when I’m looking at. AAMIG is very diverse in terms of what it manages, from cattle, sheep, cropping, chickens, timber production and livestock as well.
My role is to identify what problems each of those units are facing and come up with solutions that are driven by the problem and where there are opportunities to consolidate these solutions. Really I’m a facilitator between the subject matter experts at each of the farms and the technical experts who can recommend the solutions. It’s a very broad, very interesting business and I’m really excited to be a part of it.
[John Fargher]
Thank you, Bill. This is such a well-rounded group we have here this afternoon and the common thread is agriculture being in the blood to some degree. We’re also bringing expertise and skills from other industries in to see how it’s being done elsewhere. Whether it being in finance, banking, technology or software startups…all those types of things. We’re really bringing best practice into the industry of agriculture, which is something that we’re really passionate about here at AgriWebb. We need to harness that raw knowledge and expertise of farming to make sure that we’re really understanding the farmer, but also bringing in best practice tools, processes and techniques to make a difference and make an impact. I think that that’s coming through from you three gentlemen. I really appreciate you joining.
[End of Partial Transcript]
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