Image: The AARSC team at UNE.
Agritech is a field that attracts considerable hype but doesn’t always realise on its promises. That’s not the case with UNE’s Applied Agricultural Remote Sensing Centre (AARSC), which yesterday brought its full team together on the UNE campus to showcase seven years of genuine breakthroughs.
AARSC marries satellite remote sensing – technology that debuted in 1969 – with the latest developments in computing, including machine learning and AI, to transform crop management.
Yesterday, members of the team led by Professor Andrew Robson (pictured at centre) spoke about their transformational work. That includes mapping every main tree crop in Australia, every macadamia orchard in South Africa, and Australia’s protected cropping structures.
When an industry clarifies where its production is, it can improve harvest logistics, better prepare for disease outbreaks, and better understand the impact of natural disasters like cyclones. After the initial mapping of a crop, AARSC can then, at the invitation of an industry, start to interrogate the data more closely.
That work is now helping the Riverina rice industry better understand factors as diverse as how to minimise greenhouse gas emissions, and the optimum harvest time for different fields. It is helping the sugar industry quantify its national harvest before harvest begins, and provided the macadamia industry with an understanding of tree age and cultivars, so that harvest and nut distribution can be forecast before picking.
Next month, Prof. Robson and senior Centre researcher Craig Shephard are flying to Sri Lanka to work with the Dilmah tea empire to map its plantations – a first step to using remote sensing to support Dilmah’s production efficiencies and environmental management.
Yesterday, Prof. Robson noted that the Centre is fielding a growing number of requests for collaboration, particularly from overseas.
“Before we enter into a project, we take a hard look at how it’s going to benefit industry,” he said. “This focus, and the fact that we’re building on top of well-proven technologies, means that we get results that those in the industry can use to make genuine improvements to their sector.”
“There’s a lot of froth around agritech, and a lot of enterprises have been burned by using products that couldn’t deliver on their promise. I’m proud to say that this team doesn’t start something without knowing that it can deliver – and then everything that comes after that is icing on the cake.”