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Peter Durand, Irrigation Australia: Innovations in on-farm irrigation SPEAKER: What I want to talk about here is just some of the numbers that help to frame where we're at and why innovation needs to occur on-farm in general around the world, and then we'll gradually specify that down to an Australian level. So these are sort of big numbers. And what we're looking at is, in 2050, the population will be growing. And that'll be-- that is expected to be an additional 32% of the population. And further to that, the population will require a high-calorie requirement on a daily basis. The prediction that comes from both of those is that food production needs to increase by more than 50%. So as farmers who are using irrigation to grow crops, that's a really significant driver to innovate. There's a very strong need for them to change the way they do things and to continue to be more productive. At the same time, we're in a scenario where there's limited resources. So there's a certain amount of arable land available to us as we know it now. And because of the growth in population, that's expected to decrease by 20% per capita. What that means is that there will be a deficit in the available water and that the characterisation there is that 4 billion people will live under water stress. So again, a very strong global driver that's driving agriculture everywhere. If we bring that now down to the use of water on the global level-- we're now on the graph to the right there-- you can see that around about 70% of the available water is used for agriculture. That is then used to irrigate about 20% of the arable land. And then the final one there is that those irrigation methods are largely relatively inefficient. And efficiency's quite a difficult term to use when you're talking about irrigation, and I'll come back to that in a minute. But generally speaking, on a global level, there are a lot of people using relatively less efficient means of irrigation. So there's a driver there for that to increase.

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Page 1: Peter Durand, Irrigation Australia: Innovations in on-farm ... Web viewPeter Durand, Irrigation Australia: Innovations in on-farm irrigation . ... plant characteristics ... Peter Durand,

Peter Durand, Irrigation Australia: Innovations in on-farm irrigation SPEAKER: What I want to talk about here is just some of the numbers that help to frame where we're at and why innovation needs to occur on-farm in general around the world, and then we'll gradually specify that down to an Australian level. So these are sort of big numbers. And what we're looking at is, in 2050, the population will be growing. And that'll be-- that is expected to be an additional 32% of the population. And further to that, the population will require a high-calorie requirement on a daily basis.

The prediction that comes from both of those is that food production needs to increase by more than 50%. So as farmers who are using irrigation to grow crops, that's a really significant driver to innovate. There's a very strong need for them to change the way they do things and to continue to be more productive.

At the same time, we're in a scenario where there's limited resources. So there's a certain amount of arable land available to us as we know it now. And because of the growth in population, that's expected to decrease by 20% per capita. What that means is that there will be a deficit in the available water and that the characterisation there is that 4 billion people will live under water stress. So again, a very strong global driver that's driving agriculture everywhere.

If we bring that now down to the use of water on the global level-- we're now on the graph to the right there-- you can see that around about 70% of the available water is used for agriculture. That is then used to irrigate about 20% of the arable land. And then the final one there is that those irrigation methods are largely relatively inefficient.

And efficiency's quite a difficult term to use when you're talking about irrigation, and I'll come back to that in a minute. But generally speaking, on a global level, there are a lot of people using relatively less efficient means of irrigation. So there's a driver there for that to increase.

Again, just some big-picture stuff. This is where agriculture exists in the world. And you can overlay that. You can see the areas in red there are those areas which are defined to be exposed to water stress. And then you can look at agricultural efficiency. And this is purely just an overview in terms of crop yield.

So actual yield compared with relative potential. You can see Australia, Australia is definitely at the higher end of the agricultural productivity scale. But as I'll talk about, there's still some scope for improvement there.

OK, still on the global level. What we're seeing is farm consolidation. And I don't have the Australian data to hand. I'm sure there's people who do in the room. But here we can see from the US, and here we can see some European countries, where we're looking at the average farm size. And you can see that's increasing over the years. That's definitely something we're seeing in Australia. As I said, I can't quantify it, but it is definitely occurring.

And that changes the type of farmer that we're seeing. And this is something I see in my day-to-day role that we're now dealing with consolidated areas of more of the corporate style, the

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ag investors, people who treat farming in a slightly different manner. And what we see is that they strive more for advanced practise adoption. They're more comfortable with adopting new practises.

And I believe that's a strong driver for innovation as well. Having someone who's willing and certainly capable of bringing in new practises and implementing them on-farm.

So I guess putting those last few slides together, we get sort of a picture of where we're at. We have a situation where there's a growing demand for food due to population growth and the requirement for an increased calorie consumption. We have limited supply factors. Both land and water are scarce resources. And again, I'll come back to this term here. I know that's a little blunt there.

But largely speaking, around the world, water that is used in agriculture could be used more efficiently. What that is driving is an increased demand for water-efficient solutions and, coupled with that, higher productivity.

So finish with this one on the sort of global scale. This is not necessarily related to irrigation, but what it shows is that there's a lot of consolidation, mergers and acquisitions, a lot of activity in the on-farm business marketplace. So these are large companies that have recently merged together. And I believe that's occurring because there's a need for them to innovate, and they believe that they can be more powerful if they share the synergies that come with those mergers.

That's happening in the irrigation market as well. It's not quite as-- the numbers are certainly not quite as dazzling as those ones there. But these are really significant companies merging together, and I think that's an indicator that innovation is well and truly already happening. So let's come down to Australia, and we'll start now to bring it down to the farm level.

I'll start with the global talk. And I mentioned that efficiency is a tricky word. The reason it's tricky is that each of these application methods here-- we have gravity through to drip-- each of them do have, broadly speaking, a range of efficiency. But the way that they're used by the individual dramatically relates to what efficiency can be obtained from those methods.

So it's always quite tricky to talk about what is more efficient than something else. But generally speaking, you can rank them in this type of order here, where you have the less efficient methods at the top down to the more efficient methods at the bottom. I'll briefly just go through those for those who may not be that familiar with irrigation in Australia.

We have gravity flood or surface irrigation, as it's known here. That relates to the top two images there, and they're quite typical of what you see in terms of surface irrigation systems in Australia. You have either a series of channels, or you might have a whole bay that is flooded with water. And in many cases you might have a header channel here with syphons leading out of that to irrigate down those channels.

I purposefully left a person in this image because each of those syphons does need to be started manually. And so I think it sort of talks to the potential for innovation where you're removing that labour requirement as you change to different methods. So that's the top one. That's gravity flood or surface irrigation.

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You've then got a range of sprinkler irrigation application methods. And they range a little bit in terms of their efficiencies. So some of the, I guess, less efficient methods are these two here. This is a big gun, so you might have seen these. They're quite visible as you're driving through agricultural regions. Basically, a big jet of water that goes in a circle and it's towed through the crop.

Then you've got these wheel move systems. Again, if you live in an area they grow Lucerne or some vegetables, you would have seen those. Also in the sprinkler category, though, you have devices such as this centre pivot here, or lateral move machines. And here it's still a sprinkler-irrigated method, but it's more efficient because of the ability to adjust the speed of the pivot and adjust the flow of the nozzles and the ability to control it without the requirement for somebody to be involved.

And then the final one you've got there is a picture of drip irrigation. Specifically, that's drip in a vineyard. And I do want to make the point that crops in Australia have evolved to use particular irrigation methods. And I think it's important to remember that that's not necessarily-- that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. So you can flood irrigate a vineyard, and in years gone by that was certainly the chosen method, just as you can irrigate a rice field with drip.

So it's not necessarily-- I think there's, in some cases, a misconception there that a particular irrigation method needs to match the crop. That's not always the case.

In terms of why you get the efficiencies, I think it seems relatively sort of anecdotally evident to me. When you have water in the field subject to evaporation, subject to wind drift. In this case you can see already there there's some wind taking effect there. You lose the efficiency to some degree of the system. You're not-- when we're talking efficiency here, we're talking about delivering a certain volume of water to the crop that requires it.

As you move along the spectrum, you're then delivering a more precise amount of water with less potential for losses along the way. So before anybody questions me later about the fact that why our particular method's used in Australia, there's some really strong drivers as to why surface irrigation is still quite prevalent in Australia. And it's this here you can see. This is the variability of our rainfall.

What you see in the top graph there is, surface irrigation is the red line, and the other two lines are sprinkler and drip. And you can see the high variability. And this is the area of land which is irrigated by surface irrigation in a given year. The ABS hasn't done it every year. But what you see is that, from a peak here in 2005, a significant drop. And the reason for that is, as we all know, that was the drought. Water was not available.

To invest in a sprinkler or a drip system requires a capital investment. You're installing equipment in the field. And if you don't have a good degree of reliability that you can operate these systems, then it's unlikely to be a wise investment.

So in many areas in Australia, you have low security of water, and therefore you're actually essentially almost forced down a certain path, which is surface irrigation. And what happens there is, these systems, they still were out there. They just didn't have any water go through them for two, three, four years. So those farmers needed to wear the loss. Had they had the

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capital investment of a pivot or a drip system in the field, then obviously their losses would have been much greater.

So I say that because I think it's important to realise that it's not just that a farmer can make a decision to change an irrigation application method. There's a lot of other factors at play as well.

So you saw earlier, I had the global picture of how much was flood, sprinkler, and drip. This is the Australian situation as of 2013, 2013 and '14. And it's a little bit hard to read. I'm sorry. But if you start from the top, it goes through the list in this way.

So you have about 60% surface flood gravity irrigation in Australia. You then have the two drips, both subsurface and above-surface drip applications here, coming to about 11%. 4% in micro spray, and then the balance in overhead sprinkler methods.

I think-- in the current environment, I think it's good to see this because, although certain farmers will still be required to go for a particular application method because of their environmental situation, like I explained on the previous slide, I think this shows that there is still some significant upside to improvement in irrigation efficiency in Australia through just simply changing application methods. And I think it's particularly valid in this session because we have the federal government, who's investing in improving irrigation infrastructure. And I think it should be a positive sign that, at least in my opinion, there is room for improvement with efficiency in agriculture. And simply just on this alone, just on the application methods that are used.

So that was the on-farm application method. So I said I wanted to talk about technology as well. What you see here is two tables prepared by the Boston Consulting Group last year. And what shows in this one is this is investment in ag tech. And you can see it's dramatically growing in the last few years. So people are realising that there's investment potential in technology for agriculture.

Interestingly, in this case, that's despite falling farm incomes, at least in the US. So that's a pretty significant sign. If you break that down here, what you see is the biggest-- these are the investment categories that these companies then allocated for their investment. And you can see the biggest one is big data and analytics. And that was a recurring theme from the digital session earlier, where they're seeing the ability to collect large amounts of data and make decisions on that.

The session earlier talked more about all the off-farm data packs that are available, 2,900, I think it was. When you're talking about on-farm, you're talking about collecting site-specific data. And the way that looks in the industry we're from, which is the on-farm, it's about collecting data from the field. So this is a page just taken from one of our Irrigation Australia member websites. And it just demonstrates the sorts of things that you'd want to collect.

So you're taking soil moisture, plant characteristics, weather, wind, et cetera, et cetera, flows in the system. You're taking that information, putting it up in the cloud, combining that with all the data that's available from all the other sources out there, and then making decisions and enabling that decision to be then creating an action in the field. And this is very much the next wave, if you like. Application methods are there, but this is the front line and this is the next wave, I believe, of what will take the next gain in efficiency for irrigation.

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And I think it's demonstrated by the fact that there are a significant number of companies right now vying for a system that can do what I showed in that previous slide the best. At the moment, this is a snapshot of the companies that were at our exhibition last year. There's just been a proliferation of companies that are trying to design and develop a system that does what I showed in the previous slide. And I think it's really heartening to see.

In one case, one of those companies has been purchased by a large overseas company. So you can see there's a lot of activity. And as I said, this is the front line. Someone who comes up with this system, I think they recognise that there's big potential there.

So I'll finish-- I'll just finish with a quote, because it's quite-- I think it's an interesting quote, and it's a little bit of a plug for Irrigation Australia's training and certification programme as well, in that you can have all the technology and you can have the best application methods. Yet if you don't have the intelligence to be able to drive the system, then you won't get the outcome. I've purposefully not put who said that quote because I thought I'd ask if anybody knows who said that because it's quite interesting. No?

It's relevant because we're in Canberra. It was Alfred Deakin back in 1890. So he was our-- there's probably better political scholars than me. But as far as I know, he was our second prime minister. 1890, he wasn't the prime minister, but he was, I think, the commissioner for water. And he was quoted as saying that during a speech to a conference for irrigationists, which is a term that's gone by the wayside. And I just think it's really relevant. But A, the fact that he said that in 1890 and it's still relevant today. And obviously because we're in Canberra and he was the prime minister.

So there's my contact details. Please feel free to grab me. I'll be here for the next day or so anyway. But if you want to get in touch, then that's my contact details up there. Thanks for your time.

[APPLAUSE]