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Sally Maguire: Hello I’m Sally Maguire. New precision weed management technologies are helping Australian grain growers to more effectively target weeds and ultimately reduce their total herbicide costs. Optical sensors as well as ‘remote and sensor’ weed mapping systems are becoming more widely available, and that’s why GRDC is investing in a series of case studies to explore the benefits and costs related to these technologies. In this podcast we look at a new precision weed management technology developed out of necessity by a cropping family in New South Wales. But first up let’s hear from a Queensland grower who’s already experimenting with this technology… Wade Bistrup joins me now and Wade tell us a bit about your business?

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Wade Bistrup: We're based at a place called Warra between Dalby and Chinchilla on the Darling Downs. And we have summer and winter crops here, so we grow field peas, faba beans, got a bit of linseed this year. Wheat, barley, chickpeas in winter. Sorghum, corn, mungbeans, millets and whatnot in summer. So whatever there's a bit of money in we'll have a crack at.

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Sally Maguire: So what have been some of your farming challenges out there?

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Wade Bistrup: There's been plenty over the years. Most recent ones would have to be weed control with Roundup resistance going on. Things like, you know, wheel tracks and whatnot in wet paddocks with these wet years, that's a bit of an issue for us at the moment. But yeah, weed control is probably the big one that everyone's talking about at the moment.

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Sally Maguire: Okay. So what have you been doing to try and control weeds?

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Wade Bistrup: Well we used to use a camera sprayer. Used that sense, not long after they came out, we upgraded it to a more modern version as well. But we could never really quite get it to work so well. It didn't work so well in stubble, I suppose, is one of the biggest problems with them. It's looking at such an angle through the stubble that if you can't see the weed, you can't spray it, obviously. And even if it does see you've got sort of one nozzle over that weed. And if the weed gets shadowed by a bit of stubble from that one nozzle, it didn't kill the weed either. So if we use it, we're always going back a few weeks later to clean up survivors, and it's just an endless treadmill and just got completely sick of it, I suppose, putting the hours on it and not doing the job that we really wanted it to, and it was really hard to actually find an application for it because you'd find that you'd get a bit of rain, you get a flush of weeds up that really needed to have a broadacre spray over it. You couldn't use the camera sprayer at the time, even though you had big weeds in there you wanted to spray with a more expensive brew. So you'd go and spray a broadacre spray to kill off all the little weeds in that time, waiting 10 days for the weeds to brown out before we can use a camera sprayer, the bigger weeds are gone to seed, or you get another rainfall event and you get another flush of weeds coming up. It just never really quite worked for us, you know? We just had to be a better way, I suppose. So we started looking for other options and we came up with a single shot.

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Sally Maguire: That was grower Wade Bistrup. And Single Agriculture's new precision weed management tool has been devised and developed by the Single family, who crop near Coonabarabran in New South Wales. Let's hear from Ben Single.

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Ben Single: So we've built a drone-based sensor that will map the whole area with the goal of detecting all the weeds in an area to be spot sprayed. So we built the system from the ground up specifically for this job. We started with off the shelf technology to see the limitations with off the shelf technology, and then we've moved on from there with very specific targets around recovery rates and detection. So our goal was to meet 1000 hectares in a day, targeting weeds down to three to four cm in diameter at virtually 100 per cent detection. And that's what we've hit.

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Sally Maguire: Tell me about how you guys worked as a family. Was it about identifying the problem together and then everybody having input?

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Ben Single: Yeah. So we've got some different skill sets that have matched together quite nicely. So we've got John and Tony here on the farm providing the need and the requirement for what we actually need to do. And then I'm in the middle there. I've grown up on the farm, but not that I was working on the farm. So I've had enough experience in the farm. But with an engineering background, I can be the translator, if you want to call it, from farm technology into an engineering terminology to achieve what we actually want to do.

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Sally Maguire: And so is precision weed management the future and why?

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Ben Single: Absolutely. It's the future. It has to be so with herbicide resistance coming through, they're coming harder and harder to kill, and we need to stick on top of them. Otherwise, you're talking five to 10 year, we're talking a whole massive area in Australia that will become uneconomical to farm. So it has to be.

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Sally Maguire: That was Ben Single from Single Agriculture, who, as he mentioned, has developed a new precision weed management system in collaboration with his brother Anthony and father, John.

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John Single: My wife and I are extraordinarily privileged. Our three sons are all very, very talented boys, and they've all done extremely well on their own fields. To have, then Ben, who is actually an aeronautical and mechanical engineer, that was what he was trained in. But he has an engineer's mind and that's what we needed. So to have him then understand how a camera worked and to then understand that from an imagery that he could isolate, detect what algorithms around detecting green growth within an image. That was magic. There's a lot of people in the world that are trying to do this. And from what I see while we've been successful, whereas others haven't. We've had all the main ingredients all together. So we've had the need, that's the farmer. We've had the engineers, that's Ben. We've had advancements in terms of agronomy, that's Tony. So he's been able to take the imagery that Ben's been able to produce and then generate the best ways of actually using it for agronomy purposes. So we've had all the ingredients.

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Sally Maguire: Now let's hear from grower Wade Bistrup again about the logistics of how he is using this precision weed management tool in his business.

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Wade Bistrup: Well, it's a drone with a UBS sensor on it and you fly 80m over the paddock and you just do swaths over your paddock and you actually don't really do any flying yourself. It's just in the computer. You just put a boundary around your field and it just flies itself. You actually don't do anything, you sit there and watch it. And it flies at about 200 hectares an hour or thereabouts. So it's really quick. It doesn't take very long to get over your country. And if you pull the SSD card out of that, upload all the pictures of weeds and whatnot, and you stick that in the computer and it processes it in about the same amount of time it takes to fly the field. And what you can do with that, then, is you process the images and you can say, look, I want to spray weeds over whatever size you want. So you might want to spray all little weeds at, say, 20cm², which is really quite a small weed at five or four cm. Or you can say, I want to spray all the weeds over 400 square centimetre, 20cm, or 20 centimetre weed, and you can pick and choose whichever weeds you want to spray. And then it makes a map of exactly where all those weeds are in the field. And you take that out and you stick that in your spray rig, and your spray rig just turns on over every weed, I suppose you'd say, and turns on a group of nozzles over every weed. 2 or 3, or how big the weed is. So you sort of get a coverage of the weed from different directions with the nozzles as well. And it works really quite well. And probably the best thing about it is that, for example, last week had a fair bit of rain of late, like everybody else I suppose, and had a paddock with a lot of small weeds, and it really don't cost much to control with, you know, glyphosate or 2,4-D. But also had patches of feather top Rhodes grass which were a bit bigger. And if I had had my camera sprayer and went and sprayed that or would have sprayed, I reckon at least 50 per cent of the paddock, probably 60 or 70 per cent of the paddock just to kill everything. But I only really wanted to target the feathertop and the feathertop, you know, it might cost $70-80 hectare to spray, and the rest of the weeds might cost $10 per hectare to spray or something like that. But what I could do with the single shot was I flew over it. Then I just selected out the big weeds because the feathertop were bigger and I ended up spraying about three per cent of the paddock. Kill the feathertop is what I really wanted to do. Then I just went back with the broadacre and spent $10 to kill them. So that's an example of how it works really well.

00:07:47:29 - 00:07:52:23

Sally Maguire: And for the final word on precision weed management, let's hear from Anthony single.

00:07:53:07 - 00:08:41:13

Anthony Single: It's all about diversity and making that diversity cost-effective. Herbicide resistance has evolved because of an overreliance on glyphosate, for example. Well, we're using this technology to introduce novel modes of herbicide action, such as Group 10 Glufosinate is now a viable option and really is about controlling our weeds in different ways and breaking up the cycles so that A) we're slowing the development resistance down, and B) we're trying to really drive our seed banks down. We're never going to eliminate herbicide resistance, but if we can get our seed banks low enough, aim for 100% control every year as much as possible. We're farming with a lot less weeds in the system, so that more diversity in how we control our weeds should mean that we're going to result in a lot more sustainable weed control moving forward.

00:08:48:12 - 00:09:10:27

Sally Maguire: That was Anthony Single and earlier I spoke to John and Ben Single, developers of Single Agriculture's new precision weed management system, WeedMapper. More information can be found in the description box of this podcast or online at grdc.com.au. I'm Sally Maguire, this has been a GRDC podcast. Thanks for listening.

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A note for listeners. This case study does not cover all products in the market. Different products may have different costs and benefits.