Australia -- where men are blokes and Rice Krispies are Rice Bubbles (from left): Kent Wiley, Timothy Gertson, Michael Bosworth, Josh Sheppard, Ronnie Levy, and Steve Linscombe
Nov 20, 2023
By Timothy Gertson
Timothy farms rice in Wharton County, Texas.
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- The 2023 International Rice Leadership Development Class participated in a productive and eye-opening exchange of information with our counterparts from “Down Under” as we were granted open access to all aspects of the Australian rice industry and graciously hosted by knowledgeable SunRice staff, innovative Australian farmers, and forward-thinking breeders and researchers. I want to particularly acknowledge Mark Talbot, Mark Groat, and Peter Snell with SunRice who worked together to drive us all over the Australian countryside and coordinated many of the meetings and tours we attended.
In the small windows of leisure time at the front and back ends of the trip, the class was able to explore Sydney, the cleanest and most modern metropolitan area I have ever visited. The architecture was marvelous with each building or skyscraper utilizing eye-catching and sometimes mind-bending lines and forms. The food and culture were also enjoyable as Sydney is a melting pot of cultures and cuisines similar to what I am used to in Houston but with a different blend. Strong Asian, in particular Chinese influences, are present throughout the city, however, there is also an element of French culture that can be experienced in the many bakeries found on nearly every city block.
Instead of reporting on the trip day by day, I am going to break my comments up by industry segment. First, up is irrigation. Australia’s rice farmers are none too different than myself and my neighbors in that their number one concern is water. Their rice is nearly 100 percent irrigated by surface water from reservoirs up in the mountains. They consistently battle drought and must be able to accommodate significant swings in water availability for rice farming hence they have the most technologically advanced irrigation scheme I have ever seen. The district we visited was just putting the finishing touches on fully automated checks and delivery structures. This system, the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, spans nearly half a million irrigated acres and includes canal level indicators and flow meters that are nearly all connected via wireless telemetry. The connectivity and automation have produced field level results by greatly decreasing lead times for ordering water. Farmers order water via an app on their smartphone and the automation software and algorithms do the rest.
On-farm production techniques had both similarities and differences to Texas practices. Their field layouts were very similar to our precision “bench leveled” fields, but almost all their precision graded ground was zero grade benches that consisted of 12-15 ft wide and 2-3 ft deep tapered bank ditches running parallel with the overall slope of the field on either side of the bench. The water control structures in their levees are very large slide gates or “dump style” rubber flap and aluminum gates. We saw several fields with field level automated gates. The fields are cross ditched at about 8 ft intervals to facilitate drainage. This same design is used for multiple crops including wheat and canola. Farmers here typically only plant rice every third year which means there are almost no farmers who grow rice exclusively.
Since virtually all the rice grown in the country is sold to SunRice, SunRice also owns all the warehouse and drying facilities. The very first thing we all noticed is that there are no round metal storage bins used in the Australian rice industry – everything is stored in flat, concrete storage facilities and dried with ambient air. Because SunRice owns all the drying and storage facilities, they are able to operate them with a very lean labor force. All of the facilities are completely unmanned unless they are taking rice in or out. This means they are able to just shift crews around to wherever the action is, resulting in significant labor savings.
One thing that stood out about their rough rice intake process was the use of the newly developed PaddyVision, a technology that enables SunRice to quantify cracked grain, immature grain, and kernel length, as well as several other quality measurements on a per truck load basis using non-destructive imaging before the rice is ever dumped. This is essentially accomplished by shining light through a tray of rough rice and using imaging software to recognize the imperfections in the rice grains that become visible when intense light is used. The measurements that are taken correlate to a quality score and can be used to predict the head rice yield within 95 percent certainty. The full adoption of this technology has significantly reduced the amount of logistics management and personnel that SunRice had previously allocated to handling rough rice samples.
Australia’s rice breeding program is in the process of starting a new chapter. The program was previously a public endeavor under the umbrella of the New South Wales government, but recently was privatized at the apparent behest of the growers. The program was and continues to be funded through a grower checkoff. Current breeding efforts are focusing on cold tolerant varieties. The SunRice research farm was vast, beautiful, and technologically advanced, and is doing research into areas such as fertility and greenhouse gas emissions.
More research is conducted at Charles Stuart University, where the agricultural labs and greenhouses are well-funded and world class. Their “digital farm,” a large research farm that serves as the proving grounds for many remote sensing, telemetry, automation, and smart farming projects, assimilates tremendous amounts of data from different platforms all into a common dashboard. The data ranges from NDVI (normalized differential vegetation index) crop imagery, to facial recognition databases for cattle, to water trough pipeline pressure monitors, and everything in between. We also toured a 70-acre research field, monitored by researcher Russell Ford, that is being watered under complete automation with the irrigation decisions all being made by machine learning using five previous years of data along with live weather data to determine flood timing. A real look into the future!
Many thanks to RiceTec, ACC, and John Deere for their continued sponsorship of this valuable program. The international sessions of the Leadership Development Program work to not only further develop industry leaders, but also to foster the global exchange of ideas as we work towards more efficient and effective nutrition to feed the world’s population.