As the first commercial company in Australia and one of the few commercial companies in the world to both receive a grant from Microsoft and work in partnership with the tech giant, Goondiwindi-based InFarm is revolutionising Australian farming.
InFarm is an agricultural intelligence company best known for its drone-to-tractor solution that helps farmers control invasive plant species with precision.
This technology identifies weeds from drone imagery, which then integrates into farmers’ existing tractors to turn on and off nozzles in areas where there are weeds or no weeds.
With a history in mining, Managing Director and co-founder Jerome Leray had an understanding of remote sensing and saw its potential uses for agriculture.
“It basically set me on a path to create a system that would help farmers, and talking to farmers, one of the biggest problems was weeds. So along with my co-founder Dr Mehdi Ravanbakhsh we set about developing a product to solve farmers’ weed problems,” Leray says.
They assembled a team bringing together global industry leaders to create their agricultural platform InFarm.
Without the InFarm technology in paddock or broad acre farming, farmers spray entire paddocks regardless of the location or distribution of weeds - increasing both costs and chemicals.
InFarm allows for zones that actually contain weeds to be defined, letting farmers use their existing machinery to target weeds directly.
The drones create a weed map, which is then put into tractors using a USB. InFarm then hijacks the entire spraying system turning the nozzles on or off depending on if there are weeds or not.
“Our technology saves farmers up to 95% of their herbicide, which decreases costs and increases the gross margins on the crops. It is also good for the soil and environment by minimising chemicals in the farming system,” he says.
Although the InFarm team have been bootstrapping, they have also had help from the Queensland Government. They were an Advance Queensland Ignite Ideas recipients, allowing them to prove the system of acquiring drone images over large areas, build and scale the processing system in the backend, and employ staff to help deploy the technology to Australian farmers.
The recognition received from Microsoft has them partnering on a project for detecting Harrisia Cactus (a problem for mainly graziers in the area) and Feathertop Rhodes (a chemical resistant plant), which are two big weeds causing problems in the Goondiwindi area, and in the southern Queensland and northern New South Wales areas generally. This partnership will have the InFarm team developing a system that will allow them to detect any invasive plant species around the world from the air.
The team also won the AgForce AG Innovation of the Year award in 2017, and the AI and AG award at the Landing Pad.
Most recently InFarm is one of 33 semi-finalists in The Australian Technology Competition.
From here the InFarm team is scaling up and rolling out their technology to farmers around the entire region and across the nation.
“We have actually developed a prototype system that will allow us to map entire regions of broad acre farm, and allow us to deliver the process to farmers around Australia. We will be raising soon” Leray says.
“We really enjoy being a part of the rural innovation movement that’s happening and we are really happy to be a part of Goondiwindi. With a rich history in ag and innovation, Goondiwindi is the ag tech capital of Australia. When you look at a per capita basis more innovation has come out of this patch of dirt then anywhere else in Australia and that is an incredible accomplishment for a town that has 6000 people.
“We are really happy to be in the thick of it here in Goondiwindi and love being in Queensland.”
