This week on the podcast, we’re discussing technology adoption and genetics with Dr Penny Schulz.
Penny farms in the Limestone Coast region of South Australia (SA) with her husband Jason. She is a livestock technical specialist at the SA Drought Hub, as well as holding several other advisory positions.
“My role here with The (SA Drought) Hub is very much focused on farmer adoption,” Penny explains. “I do a lot of farmer-facing workshop work or developing new projects. So a lot of it might be about filling seasonal feed gaps or it could be around business. We've got things to do with service providers as well. But also outside of that, I do a bit of mentoring and coaching with young people and rural women's networks as well.”
Mark and Penny discuss the adoption of electronic identification (EID) technology by farmers. She explains that it's not necessarily farmer reluctance slowing down the uptake of new technologies. Rather, the existing technology infrastructure doesn't fully support farmers in leveraging the data that they collect. “We always cop it as farmers. They think that we're just not digitally savvy enough and that farmers need to get digital literacy training. And I say, ‘No, they don't’,” explains Penny. “I think their digital technology needs to catch up with everything else.”
“Farmers are fine using iPhones and laptops to get by with other parts of their life. And then when it comes to technology, whether it's physical tech or software to do with their sheep enterprise, it's clunky and it's not intuitive. And it doesn't talk to things sometimes and it does others. And we've just come to accept that that's what happens - even though it costs us $30,000 to set it up.”
Yet Mark and Penny both remain optimistic. With the recent advances in artificial intelligence, innovation in the ag sector continues to evolve. Penny points out that identifying the problem - and finding the right technology to solve it - is the key to successful technology adoption in agriculture, not the other way around.
Mark and Penny also discuss the genetics used on her family farm. Penny gained a passion for genetics when showing dairy cattle, so it is no wonder she now uses breeding values for her livestock. “In farming, there's so much you can't control. So you try and look for the information where you can get it,” she explains. “And when it comes to breeding animals, the breeding values that we have in the system, that's the information we do know. And we use it quite heavily.”
This episode is a great discussion about how data-driven strategies and technology (and genetics, of course!) are charting the course toward a more robust and productive future in agriculture.
Find out more about the SA Drought Hub by following the link below.
https://sadroughthub.com.au/about/
Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited, we help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best - info@nextgenagri.com.
Thanks to our sponsors at MSD Animal Health and Allflex, and Heiniger Australia and New Zealand.
These companies are leaders in their respective fields and it is a privilege to have them supporting the Head Shepherd Podcast. Please consider them when making product choices, as they are instrumental in enabling us to bring you this podcast each week.
Check out Heiniger's product range HERE
Check out the MSD range HERE
Check out Allflex products HERE
This week on the podcast, we’re discussing technology adoption and genetics with Dr Penny Schulz.
Penny farms in the Limestone Coast region of South Australia (SA) with her husband Jason. She is a livestock technical specialist at the SA Drought Hub, as well as holding several other advisory positions.
“My role here with The (SA Drought) Hub is very much focused on farmer adoption,” Penny explains. “I do a lot of farmer-facing workshop work or developing new projects. So a lot of it might be about filling seasonal feed gaps or it could be around business. We've got things to do with service providers as well. But also outside of that, I do a bit of mentoring and coaching with young people and rural women's networks as well.”
Mark and Penny discuss the adoption of electronic identification (EID) technology by farmers. She explains that it's not necessarily farmer reluctance slowing down the uptake of new technologies. Rather, the existing technology infrastructure doesn't fully support farmers in leveraging the data that they collect. “We always cop it as farmers. They think that we're just not digitally savvy enough and that farmers need to get digital literacy training. And I say, ‘No, they don't’,” explains Penny. “I think their digital technology needs to catch up with everything else.”
“Farmers are fine using iPhones and laptops to get by with other parts of their life. And then when it comes to technology, whether it's physical tech or software to do with their sheep enterprise, it's clunky and it's not intuitive. And it doesn't talk to things sometimes and it does others. And we've just come to accept that that's what happens - even though it costs us $30,000 to set it up.”
Yet Mark and Penny both remain optimistic. With the recent advances in artificial intelligence, innovation in the ag sector continues to evolve. Penny points out that identifying the problem - and finding the right technology to solve it - is the key to successful technology adoption in agriculture, not the other way around.
Mark and Penny also discuss the genetics used on her family farm. Penny gained a passion for genetics when showing dairy cattle, so it is no wonder she now uses breeding values for her livestock. “In farming, there's so much you can't control. So you try and look for the information where you can get it,” she explains. “And when it comes to breeding animals, the breeding values that we have in the system, that's the information we do know. And we use it quite heavily.”
This episode is a great discussion about how data-driven strategies and technology (and genetics, of course!) are charting the course toward a more robust and productive future in agriculture.
Find out more about the SA Drought Hub by following the link below.
https://sadroughthub.com.au/about/
Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited, we help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best - info@nextgenagri.com.
Thanks to our sponsors at MSD Animal Health and Allflex, and Heiniger Australia and New Zealand.
These companies are leaders in their respective fields and it is a privilege to have them supporting the Head Shepherd Podcast. Please consider them when making product choices, as they are instrumental in enabling us to bring you this podcast each week.
Check out Heiniger's product range HERE
Check out the MSD range HERE
Check out Allflex products HERE
Welcome back to Ed Shepard and welcome Penny Schultz along to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Mark, for having me.
Speaker 1:Great to have you along after a bit of a gestation period, as some of these, I guess, are. Penny, you're there in South Australia. It'd be great to just hear, I guess, a bit about your background, how you ended up farming alongside your family there in the Longstown Coast in South Australia, but yeah, maybe how you ended up passionate about ag in the first place and we'll go from there.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I guess I went to a really cool agricultural high school right in the middle of Adelaide, CBD. So I didn't grow up on a farm. My dad did, but his parents moved off the farm to look for opportunity that they weren't getting in the country. And that's funny that another generation on I went out into rural areas to find opportunity for the areas that are really interested in me. But I went on to do a Bachelor of Agriculture in Animal Science that ended up as a pasture agronomist and that took me around the place doing a fair bit of work either in the South East or in the Southwest of Victoria and mostly with dairy farmers, and I loved dairy cows at the time, including genetics and even the show dairy cows. Not many people know that I love my skin.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's quite infectious if you love showing cattle.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I suppose my love for genetics grew and I wanted to do a bit more study as well, and so I went on to do some more post-grad study at the University of New England, which led to a PhD, but in a mark store that I ended up marrying a local farmer in a little district or field in the limestone coast who also happened to love cattle, sheep and genetics, and it was a little match made in heaven sometimes.
Speaker 2:But yeah, so my husband Jason and I we have a sheep and beef operation, I suppose, in the upper part of the limestone coast and we raise our family there as well. But we breed first cross eulams, which, for those that are not into sheep as much as me, that's a merino borderleste across. We hold on as breeders to put a secondary crossover, though we sell them as eulams and they're joined as eulams as well. And then we also used to have a beef stud business as well, so producing bulls, females, embryos, salmon that got sold not just in Australia but also into New Zealand and into Indonesia. And yeah, now, after running my own side business as well for a while, I now work for the University of Adelaide in their SA Drought Hub Agency. So that's about working with farmers to help build their business resilience to drought, but also just climate change and climate variability, yeah excellent and, yeah, a familiar story.
Speaker 1:Well, not a familiar story, but getting that passion from somewhere that sparked from school and then flow through, and often it's through showing cattle or something where you meet somebody and then everything goes from there. But if we drill into, I guess, yeah, that passion of genetics and obviously your sourcing some well-known borderless genetics there in Flintstone is to fuel that, I guess, value for your climate. But I guess, yeah, what have you learned over those years of how well farmers are applying their genetic principles to their farms?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's highly variable and I guess in farming there's so much you can't control, so you try and look for the information where you can get it. And when it comes to breeding animals, the breeding values that we have in the system, whether it's sheep or cattle, that's the information we do know, so that's what we use, it quite heavily. And there's always that challenge right of breeding better each generation. So that gives you. Well, that's where we get our buzz from, I guess.
Speaker 2:And having a bit of pride in the stock that you produce, that they're really productive, that they're efficient, that they're profitable, and these days we're not enough to start thinking about are they sustainable as well? That's the next challenge. And being able to buy from a breeder like the Arnie's, who you know their passion's bigger than ours, which I didn't think was possible, but it certainly is and quite progressive as well, where it's not just about breeding for what animals should look like as a breed, but what the industry needs and what markets need and that they suit their clients' needs as well. And I've come to terms with the fact that not all farmers that I work with are perhaps as passionate about it as I am, so I've done a lot of work, as you might know, mark. That's probably what I think. That's where.
Speaker 1:I met you.
Speaker 2:We're running a breadwell-fed-well pilot program on our farm a long time ago and, yeah, you don't always get the same reception. But most farmers know how important it is and it's good to be able to deliver workshops to those that feel they know it's important and be able to give them at least the fundamental skills to be able to purchase the rounds of the balls that are going to suit their needs, rather than getting wound up in the overwhelming task of those sort of purchases.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you put it well where you said that you control the controllables. And yeah, I mean this is any season's variable and if you look around our listenership at the moment there's some people are facing some pretty hard dry times, uncharacteristically, in parts of New Zealand, and other parts have had heaps of summer rain that wasn't predicted in the East Coast of Australia, so trying to farm under that variation is clearly tough. But the thing we know is that every year on year we can make genetic gain and buy by buying the right balls and rams and selecting the right replacement females. So that's something that we're given or in and out of good seasons that could continue to happen. So it is something that obviously we're clearly both passionate about and thinks really important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess we sort of started I sort of started in an agronomy based job when I left uni in terms of sort of understanding pastures and at the time we were doing a lifetime wall project that became lifetime new management and yeah, I think that grounding in that feed base is important but also and I'm not sure if you got to experience it but me seeing those the variation of how animals handle those different systems is always fascinating and we've just had Wendy Wendy Rao on that, talked about her resilience and stuff.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I know that you and Jason there have been pretty focused on the, on the sort of, I guess, on a different borderluster, on one that's got fat and muscle in it, because we know that those females are going into production systems that often they're either cold and wet and higher stocking rate, or they're hot and dry and tough enough anyway. So you've got to build an animal for a clientele that who probably doesn't, may or may not know why that animal performs, because they're buying the female without a set of using that essentially. But you've managed to build in the, the engine room that that they get to get the value out of, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then the other upside of trying to put that muscle and fat and growth into the you lambs that are going on as breeders is that our well, sounds terrible to call a byproduct but the the weather portion of those lands, traditionally, and certainly 10, 20 years ago, hardly any processor wanted to buy them.
Speaker 2:But you know, through breeding we've been able to breed a first cross water lamb that you know, is a really good product and grows well and finishes like any other prime lamb should, and so it's much more saleable and much more profitable if you can do that as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, cool, and before we move on from the family business, we'll obviously give Jason a plug with him, with being the chair of Lamax a big big thing happening in in South Australia in August. So yeah, it'll be all no doubt talk about that more over time, but yeah, I know there's going to be lots of people lining up to get themselves to South Australia. It's going to be great to have Lamax back underway. It's also an interesting house with you away doing your job and him flat out. I think he'll be quite busy in that job, no doubt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we like ships in the night, but we try and help each other out and obviously our our types of work collide as well. So, yeah, but Lamax is certainly I mean, we would have been excited about it even if we weren't involved in it, but it's great to see it back on the agenda and they are celebrated great product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure. So if we move on to what keeps your farm these days and that's the livestock technical specialist there at the SA Drought Hub at University of Adelaide, lots of other sort of ordinary advisory roles as well. So just talk us through what I guess what you're up to these days and what drives you to keep that driving force for livestock production.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my role here with the, with the hub, is very much focused on farmer adoption rather than, you know, more research. I mean there's a lot more sort of demonstration type trials happening, but a lot of either farmer facing workshop kind of work or developing new projects that South Australia might be able to lead, or we can have things that go right across borders.
Speaker 2:That isn't just genetics, though, so a lot of this might be about filling seasonal feed gaps, or it could be around business, golly gosh. We've got things to do with service providers as well, like capacity building, but also outside of that, I do a bit of mentoring and coaching with young people and rural women's networks as well. And going on with the climate kind of environmental theme, I sit on the Premier's Climate Change Council here in South Australia and also chair the Lancocoste Landscape Board, and for other regions they call those NRM boards or catchment management authority, so sort of things, and yeah, so sustainable primary production is an area of passion for me, and how that intertwines with being productive and profitable.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So, yeah, exposure to lots of different people within the industry, different groups, and I guess we've been through hopefully through a pretty tough period in livestock with prices not doing what they could and what we would like them to do, and certainly seen a bit of that recovery in Australia, whereas probably still waiting for that here in New Zealand and probably the West Coast as well in Australia. But I guess, yeah, with knowing what you know, seeing what you see and what is your vision for ag, what are the exciting things that we should be looking to in the future or what you see coming that the average farmer might not see coming, and, yeah, I guess the yeah. It's easy to all think it's doom and gloom, but there's some pretty exciting things happening in the industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we're at a bit of a tipping point at the moment. Farming, and agriculture in particularly livestock production, was seen as this problem that needed to be fixed, which is quite daunting when you're one of them and you're busy trying to be a great food producer and then you're seen as this problem. But I think that sort of table is turning a bit quite a few settings where we are actually part of the solution and I hope it actually goes further than that, because I think we're part of an important production cycle as well and we shouldn't rest on our laurels, but we should be working towards sustainability goals but also being recognised for that and being acknowledged for it. I think one of the real challenges is with what we've got at the moment. There's only so many levers farmers can pull to.
Speaker 2:You know everyone's quite focused on carbon, so that's what I'll talk about. There's only so many levers we can pull to be more efficient and reduce our emissions intensity and our general carbon footprint, and a lot of farmers are going down that pathway now, which is fantastic, and there's generally kickbacks on your bottom line as well if you can pull those levers, and then we've got a few extra ones throughout Marvy about planting something or supplementing something or having a tree project. That might give you a little bit more, and I'm seeing some good stuff from the genetics perspective as well, with sustainability indexes, and we've now got that in the marino job.
Speaker 2:So I'm seeing more levers, which is really good, but I think if we're going to need to do some serious reductions in emissions as far as livestock goes, it's going to have to be another thing that we don't currently have in our arsenal.
Speaker 2:I mean, we're all talking about some red seaweed. You know eospirogopsis, but that's a fair way away still like to be widespread commercially available for all farmers, and yeah. So I think we need some serious investment that needs to go into those next big additional new technologies that we might not even know about yet. If we want to see that, you know, if we want to see the dial seriously to go over, that's what's going to need to happen and I'm excited that might be happening.
Speaker 2:But I think we also need to be realistic that in the next 10 years, we're just going to have to keep working towards what we can do and keep investing in the new things that we don't currently have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, excellent, and we've been talking a bit over the last six to 12 months around how we work with farmers to, I guess, implement EID. Eid is coming to Australia in a compulsory form and lots of individuals probably aren't that excited about that concept of having another burden on a bottom line that's already pretty tight. Obviously, you and I are keen on how we help farmers not see that or try and find ways to use that opportunity or as an opportunity rather than the cost, and encourage farmers to sort of start bringing a bit more data into livestock production, which is probably sorely missing in a sheep production system across big chunks of the listenership. Thanks, mr닛.
Speaker 2:Oh, totally agree. It is easier said than done, so I don't want to be a hypocrite and a lot of businesses are half set up for it already anyway. So the step might not be that big, but handling that amount of data probably is. But I think we probably do need to go down a bit more of a prescriptive way of farming in the sheep sector, rather than have this mob mentality and just hoping that everyone's going to reach their potential and be efficient and productive for us. It doesn't quite work that way anymore. Everyone's got to perform. You don't want those passengers, as we hear a lot, and EIDs are a really good tool to be able to do that. I still think a lot of the technology is a bit clunky.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know if you're doing stuff in the yards and you're doing your auto-draft. I sort of look at it from a big picture perspective and essentially farmers are almost doing basic coding to auto-draft sheep. You know, based on something that put in previously, and I think you know there's probably points of sale programs in a beauty salon that are probably a bit more advanced than that. So I think you know agriculture, we always we cop it as farmers. I think that we're just not digitally savvy enough that farmers need to get digital literacy training.
Speaker 1:I'm like no, no, no they don't.
Speaker 2:I think their digital technology needs to catch up with everything else.
Speaker 2:So, you know, farmers are fine using iPhones and laptops to get by with other parts of their life and then, when it comes to technology, whether it's physical tech or software to do with their sheep enterprise, it's clunky and it's not intuitive and it doesn't talk to things sometimes and it does others, and we've just come to accept that that's what happens, even though it costs us $30,000 to set it up. So I think, yeah, that's a money thing. I think that there hasn't been enough money in that sector to warrant people to invest and make things better. So maybe that will change over time and that might help farmers use their EID-based information better when it becomes more like pressing a button that says you know, score three, u's go this way and it's an icon, not a. You know, typing in numbers into a spreadsheet to make sure it goes left and right and whatever, because other things in our life, even a self-serve checkout, seems to be a bit more advanced. So, you know, I think our equipment and our technology needs to catch up with what our expectations are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can agree more, I think. Yeah, this morning I had a chat with a guy on Island who's developed or him and his dad had developed an app that will tell you which sheep to drench, based on their life weight change, and it's all on an app and it's driving their auto-draft and you just like. It was probably one of the first examples where you just go. That's actually a solution for a problem. That's using the tech in the right way and it's really easy and it's going at the pace it needs to and it's not. Yeah, you don't need to be a Mark Mortimer to be able to drive it, you can just be any person coming off the street and yeah.
Speaker 1:So that sort of third party top solution, which I think is definitely a money problem and one of the problems with there only being even if you nail the market, you might sell 100, if you've got everyone in the market, you might sell 100,000 versions or something. Where there isn't any consumer software. You're in the millions in no time, kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:But I think, yeah, I think we are seeing change and yeah, we're not. None of us are pretending that AID is going to be the next big thing to make your money, but there are certainly ways that we can help to understand our business is better using AID, and that's sort of what we want to explore and in some work we'll hopefully get to do one day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, hopefully, like that, farmer actually saw that problem, found the bit of technology that was going to solve it for him or her and Created it and it worked and it's done and other people might be able to use that too. And that is the absolute Baseline of everything. Whether it's a technology company Trying to launch something or whether it's a farmer working in their business, everything needs to start with the problem. So I think some of the technology adoption lag Earlier on that farmers used to get blamed for we used to have this technology coming out that would then try and find a problem to fix and they apply the tech to that and Then try and sell it on to somebody else, whereas I think now People are getting better and they're getting cleverer that they've got to start with the problem, then find the tech to fix it and then you can go to a farm with a really good value proposition.
Speaker 2:That's easy to communicate, but even at farm level, I think farmers can actually sit down and make their own problem list. We've done it and I've basically did a couple of years ago. And what's the stuff that we hate doing? That's, you know, just such a bug there or it takes too long to do. That's why everyone hates it and you go through that list and then Prioritize them and then do some research to work out Is there a piece of technology or is there a change, a physical change, now Lane way, or something that's going to make that that easier and start working through it that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's, it's true, and I listened to a book called buy back your time, which, which was, which was pretty good and then proper to me to make a few changes in our business was still got plenty to go, but it's a long list of improvements we can make as well. Yeah, those concepts of yeah things, that yeah Seems like an investment, but if you value your time any more than about a dollar an hour, then it doesn't often doesn't take long to pay for a lame-ass something where you're having to hold sheep off and and you can't just yeah, those, some of those labors, having things on farmer, not necessarily crazy money yet can have, can have big impacts on not just, I guess, not just how much money you're making or whatever, but half a time it's quality of life like you're actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah you're inside before the kids are in bed and that's all stuff, rather than Saturday, sometimes even a piece of mind.
Speaker 2:You know a lot of the water monitoring systems. Now. A Lot of people don't even they're not even crunching the numbers anymore around those sort of systems. It's like I, I need to know now, like what my water's doing. I need to know now if there's a problem. I don't want to know, but when there's an oasis in the middle of the paddock and that's, it's like a piece of mind thing. When you go away on the weekend We'll go after football or something. That you've got all that information that you need.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I don't know if I've so talked about this from your nose in, really. But yeah, we often think that Everyone's looking for something to make sense in the bottom line. But yeah, often it's. I don't know how I invest in private life. Like half of stuff you spend it on is just just peace of mind or you just you just don't want to have that problem, so it doesn't really matter. Within reason, you're not that worried about the cost to where there's any return on it. You just you just want to be able to have a restful weekend, so you don't want to. You want to know the cows haven't broken or got off and you got water going everywhere, or in the tanks or empty, or the windmill is not turning or whatever it is.
Speaker 1:So it's yeah and that doesn't change the economic business, but it changes how much you enjoy that time away.
Speaker 2:That's right, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Excellent. How's things otherwise in South Australia? Is the? This will be going out in a couple of weeks. I might have might draw it off a bit before then, but is it? You're going getting a heap of rain, that Unseasonal rain, and looking good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had a fair bit of unseasonal rain, basically from whole gosh mid November through to Through some of January. Not all regions got it. I will acknowledge that there are still a few areas of SA they're pretty dry but other areas that you know a lot of Restockers go a bit excited about because suddenly they had feed. But it is compensating for a bit of a average or below average Spring that many people suffered in the Jinni, the Southeast, but you're not looking pretty good, I will admit. We've probably got more feed than what we do by most summers, which certainly again, well, we're talking about quality of life it certainly takes the pressure off if you've got feeding the paddock and you're not feeding out Silage and hay every day. Yeah, and the stock certainly do better when they've got quality feed in the paddock that's green in the middle of summer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so you've got a loose and primrose sort of base on some of your pastures, or is it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a bit of vell grass as well, but don't Lee dry land loosen. Yeah it's pretty sandy country, but the loosen does well on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's proper saying that.
Speaker 2:It's like beach sand. People will say I've got sandy soil like no, you don't.
Speaker 1:It's a good stuff, no, excellent. Well, um, yeah, we'll leave it there, we'll get you get back on with your busy day and, yeah, thanks very much for having a chat and look forward to seeing it at Lamaks, if not before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Lamaks. 79 August in Adelaide, 2024.
Speaker 1:Jason or bio beer for saying that.
Speaker 2:Thanks very much, mark.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Benny.