Australian agtech company expands its AI tech, helping growers combat climate change

Climate change is making weather more and more unpredictable. We can't control mother nature, but we can use technology to help growers understand her moods. The stake are high. We have a burgeoning population growth, we have climate change like we've never seen before, and if we're unable to solve some of these challenges, then, quite literally, people will go hungry. The Yield is an Australian AgTech business. We focus on taking the guesswork out of growing The purpose of The Yield is to feed the world without wrecking the planet. We use real-time weather data at the farm, field, row, right down to the hotspot level. That data then goes through processed, which manages all this network of mesh on the farm. And then it goes into Microsoft Azure cloud where we apply our machine learning and we deliver our applications that help growers know when to plant, when to irrigate, when to feed, when to protect it and when to harvest. If you measure it, you can manage it and that's something we believe in. As part of the agricultural grown system here in Tasmania, we are continually challenged day in, day out by the weather. A lot of it was just guess work. A lot of records that we manually kept. The Yield now steps up and it gives me those figures instantaneously, which is fantastic. We can now bounce back from an adverse incident a lot quicker. The really big problems we're trying to do is, increase yield, reduce import costs, reduce risk and increase environmental sustainability of our food production systems. So in our first product that we released in aquaculture, we were really clear that we were able to reduce unnecessary harvest closures caused by rain by 30%, giving growers back four weeks a year from which they can harvest. And we're doing exactly the same thing in agriculture. Just down the road from here Houston’s farm estimate that they save 30% of their irrigation cost in water losses through using our technology. I've got a son and a daughter who will hopefully one day, come into the business so it's giving us that certainty that I'm providing a future for our kids and my father's grandchildren. We have to learn to collaborate and come up with new business models, and work out how we're gonna solve these very big problems and challenges together.