How not to get left at the drafting gate with shearers….. I have heard a lot of noise about how difficult it is to find shearers. In an environment where they are in short supply there are a few things you can do to make sure they turn up when you need them. 1- Toilets… Shearers and shed staff are humans, not dogs, with a lot of females joining teams and monthly requirements a flushing toilet is an obvious basic requirement.

Fleece weighing tutorial for those that are interested... you will need a scale head, barcode reader, load bars, EID reading wand, thermal printer, bulldog clips and a bucket.... start by setting up your scalehead for fleece weighing ( I will blog this at a later date)..... Essential ingredient you must be using EID tags start by connecting your EID reading wand to your thermal printer via Bluetooth (make sure your wand doesn’t connect to your scalehead as well). You can now walk the board and scan EID tags and a barcode should print out....

Long Thread Warning -I have been on a massive learning journey implementing AgTech on farm for a while now and I feel somewhat obligated to share these learnings with the industry especially after the opportunities I have been given via the @AgriFuturesAU Rural Womens Award.1/17 My next acknowledgement must go to @the_wes_man_ for being an excellent sounding board, a wealth of knowledge and a way with words.... together we are proud to bring you the #8pillarsofagtech framework that deconstructs solutions into their fundamental elements, or pillars..2/17

Whoever in industry keeps telling govt & RTOs that the main training our staff need is around chemicals and chemical handling please STOP! Who puts an amateur on a multi thousand dollar machine and runs the risk of them spraying the wrong thing in the wrong spot?? #notme The main entry points to employment on farm are seeding and harvest... teach them to check/service & drive a tractor, safety around augers, how to trouble shoot small motors that run firefighters/augers. How to hook up & safely tow implements/silos & trailers. #notimetowipebums

Dear AgTech world, If you want to move from on the precipice to a fully flourishing industry being adopted by farmers then dump the subscription business model. As a farmer I can’t have 10 holes in the bucket (subscriptions). Cashflow is king in every business including farmers Annual subscriptions are like Whiteants in my budget, chewing away regardless of use. It’s a bit like my Apple Music (if anyone can tell me how to remove that feel free) In tight years such as low rainfall these things can be crippling to a farm budget.

With possession being 9/10ths of the law.. how much of your farm data do you physically possess?? Although tech companies say you own your data.. do you? Technically they have possession of it and are sending you an aggregated report.. So is what they are really saying is that they aren’t currently onselling the data they possess on your behalf? Will that always be the case? Is it time farmers thought about this more? We are being encouraged towards open source but who really benefits and is it both ways?

EARMARKING.. a 16th century form of stock ownership.. I know on our farm we rely more on our eartags not our earmark.. I know eartags can be removed but earmarks can also be deformed with the introduction of DNA testing and EID tags... is this process still relevant?? Given the rise in activism and the current onslaught of farm practices... should we as an industry be reviewing what we do on farm.. earmarking is in my view unnecessary, can be perceived as cruel, creates an extra stress on our lambs and an entry point for infection..

I’ve been emerging myself in the Agtech space for a while now and if I can give my fellow farmers any advice it’s this.... make sure that YOU own YOUR Data.... doesn’t matter if you don’t know what to do with it... but if you don’t own it who is?? The time to establish data ownership is now while the industry is new. It is forecast that by 2050 there will be 4.1 million bits of data coming from a farm everyday. Do you want someone else to own those 4.1 million bits of data?

So this happened back in March and things have been a bit quiet on the Award front as I have been going through the process of obtaining animal ethics approval for my collars...that has come through last week ... so what is it that these collars allow me to do? Well here is what sheep wearing collars looks like on my mobile phone.... I get a reading every 30mins....