Talking HealthTech: 300 – A connected farming future; Hamish Munro, Pairtree Intelligence (Talking AgTech special episode)

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In celebration of reaching the episode 300 milestone, this episode of Talking HealthTech is actually the first episode of a sister podcast within our network called Talking AgTech – showcasing the use of technology in agriculture.  

Subscribe to the Talking AgTech podcast via your favourite podcast player. 

If you’re running a farm, you need to make a lot of decisions, and of course, if you’re going to be making informed decisions, you need reliable data and insights – about livestock, crops, weather etc. From hardware, software, connected devices, networks and apps.  

Having to access, juggle and make sense of incompatible on-farm data from various digital devices and services makes the life of a farmer even more challenging than it already is.

Joining Pete in this episode is Hamish Munro from Pairtree Intelligence – who are centralising disparate data sets into a single log-in space, enabling ‘data stacking’ for higher level analytics and greater decision support at the fingertips of farmers.

In this conversation, we learn more about Pairtree and the problem they are solving – the need for data convergence, not just data centralisation, issues of carbon and stewardship and what the connected farm of the future might look like here in Australia, plus lots more.

Meet Hamish Munro

Hamish Munro is a fifth-generation farmer from the Central West of NSW. In 2018 Hamish and his business partners co-founded Pairtree Intelligence to integrate sensors, apps, satellite imagery and more. 

Growing up, Hamish’s family farm had a mix of cattle, cropping and sheep. As a result, he focused particularly on the cattle for a number of years and later went into cropping. Hamish also spent around nine years representing the Australian beef industry at the state, national and international levels on the Cattle Council of Australia. This was his first step into it being exposed to the innovation happening within Australia and led him to look at the power of data..

All About Pairtree Intelligence

In 2018, Hamish and his co-founders kicked off Pairtree when the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries asked them to help them out with a small project on two farms. On both farms, they had very good network connection using WiFi, gateways and a tower; however, they could not see the data. That’s where Pairtree came into play. 

Pairtree connected to the data and pulled the two farms together; that is, data from the soil, rain gauge, climatic conditions etc. But because they were all isolated, they weren’t very helpful in a context where farmers could make a decision from them. Pairtree pulled the overall message together using a number of bits of data, as this is something that farmers also need. 

Making Informed Farming Decisions Easier 

At the end of 2018, Pairtree’s second project was with Livestock Australia. There were five properties with a total of five different network connectivity options, fifteen different providers, twenty-five different devices and two-hundred and eighty different devices. This led to the start of many other interesting AgTech projects. 

Is there a Standard Data Format?

Currently, there is no data standard in Australia for farming because of annual cycles, making it hard to repeat a data set from the previous year. The biggest thing for AgTech is the very small margins; therefore, there is a need to minimise the cost to the industry that is added on top. 

If standardisation actually creates extra cost from AgTech companies that are already existing, you know, then, then there’s very minimal value directly to the farmer. While standardisation needs to be done at some stage, right now, it would stifle innovation. 

Data Convergence Versus Data Centralisation

At the moment, Pairtree has approximately one hundred and thirty different AgTech and digital solutions that it can connect to for data centralisation. The first thing that Pairtree does is to provide flexibility to the farmer to choose which suite of AgTech solutions is ideal for their farm. They then centralise that data because farmers want apps to talk to each other so they can get that more repeatable data for better decision-making support. 

Pairtree specialises in data convergence. So, for example, they can determine that out of the weather station, they just need humidity, radiance, temperature, and a few other things to then look at a specific disease within the crop or livestock. Of a fact, a weather station and a sensor- centric view don’t help to make a decision. It’s about pulling those metrics out and putting them into a lot of research and the algorithms that have already been done to determine what will and will not be an issue in the future. 

Minimising Complexity for Front-end Users

Pairtree places all the related data into a specific paddock.  Animals are moved around in a rotation between paddocks or crops, and they’re set aside for that year. Pairtree has created an approach so that any data that they have, whether it’s geo allocated within the app that they get or whether they have to make some joins on the paddock name or a few other options, placing that data into those paddocks so that they can run these algorithms going forward.

Additionally, with there being so many different AgTech companies, Pairtree wants to complement and not compete. Firstly, Pairtree always tries to allow the alarms and the device setup etc., to be set up on the supplier’s app. Pairtree then complements this by pulling that data and preventing the need for them to keep on building new modules and expanding sideways from their area of expertise. 

This allows for a quick and iterative approach to pulling those metrics out and allowing them to fit within whatever insights that an agronomist, a consultant or large agribusiness is looking for.

Customers of Pairtree Intelligence

Currently, there are a number of agribusinesses using Pairtree Intelligence. Between 2018 and 2021, Pairtree tried to build a data centralised system for farmers that would be a one-stop solution for all their farming needs. But over time, they now build white labels for various agribusinesses, agronomists and consultants. They are currently working on a project with Syngenta – the world’s largest chemical company. Stemming from their research into disease models, Syngenta is creating software solutions to stop the indiscriminate use of agrochemicals. They aim to control diseases by using the hyperlocal approach to crops and diseases that present a greater opportunity to preserve extensively used chemistries and perhaps rotate them or start the introduction of biological solutions. 

Pairtree’s role in the project is to grant Syngenta access to over sixteen different weather station AgTech companies. The service is hyperlocal, and they are not prescriptive on the choice of AgTech provider or farmers. Farmers simply choose a reliable weather station that is well-serviced in their local area.

Carbon Stewardship

Quite a few tech companies are doing a lot in terms of carbon stewardship. Nonetheless, PairTree believes that integration is going to be the key to driving long-term co-beneficial outcomes in the carbon space. The company is able to connect multiple livestock management solutions or multiple farm management software platforms, curate their data and produce meaningful insights from them. 

On Pairtree Plus (basic level version for entry-level farmers), as part of stewardship, they provide farmers with a hundred years’ worth of rainfall data and a comparison over the last ten years to know how their seasons are progressing so that they can make timely decisions like whether to de-stock or add stock when necessary. They are also provided with spray insights into when contractors should be spraying, satellite imagery and markets. 

Ultimately, the basic approach allows people who are typically not on their farms regularly to still make the right farming decisions and make progress.

Bridging the Research/Science-market Gap

Through his years working with the Cattle Council, Hamish encountered lots of frustrations because there was a gap between research development on one hand and then extension and adoption on the other hand. Extension and adoption are critical in the system. A lot of research gets done with public funds, but it is frustrating that they often end up on shelves or in stranded apps. 

Creating apps as solutions often encounters entry barriers like key requirements for it to function. Some apps require users to enter much information, which could take a couple of hours, and then the app could still request such information at a later time when the user attempts to use it. Pairtree solves this sort of problem by hosting the data or pushing the required data into the solution to drive it in real time so long as the algorithms are present. 

Essentially, they create apps that connect to key farm apps, and then research apps can also fetch data from them.

Future of Connected Farming

There are lots of innovations happening in the connected farming space. There are autonomous vehicles like tractors from SwarmFarm Australia and robotic tractors from Nelly. All of these innovations are the real enablers of autonomous farming. Though there is a need for other components and management, if the bots are available to autonomously perform all needed farming operations, then the industry is on track. Despite all of these, there are still going to be massive agricultural opportunities for humans in the future. The whole family will also be able to participate actively in agricultural activities – daughters, the computer nerd, and the geek, as it will no longer be for the physically strong members only. Interestingly, these categories of people will become critical in the future due to possible labour shortages. These “family opportunities” are not present in other industries. There will also be many more interesting opportunities in agriculture in the future.

Maintaining the Farming Craft in the Family

Succession planning is a massive issue within agriculture. Though farms are massive assets, a lot of farmers are not really cash-rich. From his personal experience, Hamish’s father had a significant amount of farmland; unfortunately, Hamish could not continue with it. Herein lies more opportunities. Traditionally, one of the children will be needed to take over their dad’s place on the farm, but with modern technology, the children could be in different places and still contribute just as much in different ways.

_{Source talkinghealthtech.com}