Farms & Farm Machinery #397

HORTICULTURE
remote control
Perth-based Swan
Systems uses Cloud-based
technology to help farmers
manage their water use,
irrigation and crop health.
By Lincoln Bertelli
Above: Swan Systems says that water
savings can be achieved from between
20 to 30 per cent
We built systems which
helped us to take that data
and turn it into meaningful
day-to-day operational
decisions.
What started as a challenge during a consulting job for
Rio Tinto has evolved into a company that beat global
competition for an agricultural technology startup award last
December.
Founded in 2016, Swan’s origins can be traced further back to
2010 when two of the eventual co-founders – Ivor Gaylard and
Tim Hyde, whose backgrounds are in farming and consulting –
were working with mining giant Rio Tinto on an environmentallysensitive
job near Karijini National Park in Western Australia.
“They needed to know seven days in advance, on any given
day, how much water was going where,” says Gaylard, who is
Swan’s chief operating officer and head of product development.
“There were a lot of extra challenges over and above normal
farming challenges.
“We took our existing systems and ways of doing things and
added an extra level on to that, so over a couple of years we
built systems which enabled us to do that efficiently.
“They had installed a lot of soil moisture sensors, flow meters
[and] weather stations, and a lot of that data was coming
through to our office.
“We built systems which helped us to take that data and turn it
into meaningful day-to-day operational decisions – working out
the optimum amount of water to apply, the fertiliser program
and doing all the reporting.”
The success of this led to further interest from other parties
and, in 2016, Gaylard and Hyde joined with Rod Campbell and
formed Swan Systems to commercialise their product.
“We basically took what was an in-house system and put it on
the Cloud and made it scalable and suitable for any crop and
any irrigation system,” says Gaylard.
WINNING PITCH
Swan – which stands for Scheduling Water and Nutrients – first
took out the top honour in the Digital Innovation category at
WA’s Innovator of the Year awards in 2018. It then won the
global ag-tech category in Rabobank’s Foodbytes! Pitch awards
for startups last year and was one of only two Australian
companies named in a subsequent Rabobank report as
‘startups to watch’ in 2021.
So, for a software-based innovation, rather than a physical
piece of farm equipment, how does it all work?
“Swan is a decision-support system. It integrates with a lot
of hardware but we don’t deal with hardware ourselves,” says
Gaylard.
“In a lot of cases, we can come in and the farmer has got
some existing hardware and we just plug in to that. We bring
their data in and help them make daily irrigation decisions
– how much to irrigate, when to irrigate and manage their
seasonal water use so they can do budgeting, planning for
the season and then track their water use against that budget
over the season.
“We can help do fertiliser programs or bring in their own
programs and then track what they’re actually doing against
that program and allow them to manage that, and we bring in
satellite imagery as well which they can use to keep an eye
on the health of their fields and identify issues, particularly
irrigation-related issues.
“There are some directly measurable financial benefits. A lot of
the time there are water savings and quite often in the region of
20 to 30 per cent.
“There are also yield increases by providing plants with
optimum water and quality increases as well so the effect on a
farmer’s bottom line is significant and measurable.
“There are a whole lot of benefits that are harder to quantify
like more efficient oversight of what’s going on, easier
management and incorporating best practice in a systemised
way so staff coming in and out can quickly pick up what’s
going on.”
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