Good morning, growers!
An Armidale couple's in-paddock cattle scale has picked up the NSW Westpac Innovation in Agriculture award, according to coverage from The Land. Optiweigh started with steers trying to lick the mirrors on Bill Mitchell's ute. Now it's built in Armidale and sold into six other countries. Kit that earned its keep on the inventor's own place first is the kind we back.
Australia
Scales the Cattle Walk Onto
Optiweigh, an Armidale-built in-paddock scale, is the NSW pick for innovation at the Australian Agriculture Awards.
Bill and Jacqui Mitchell run grass-fed beef at Armidale and were forever weighing cattle in the yards. A lick block draws stock onto the Optiweigh platform. When steers wouldn't put their back feet on it, Mitchell cut the platform in half and bet that front-feet weights would track whole-body weight.
They ran it at home for about five years, then commercialised it as a 2019 drought project. Mitchell says they were about to deliver their 2000th unit, with about 22 staff and all manufacturing in Armidale. Next stop is the national awards in Canberra in November.
Lasers That Weigh the Grass
CSIRO is turning a vineyard laser tool into a faster way to measure how much feed is in a paddock.
At Boorowa in southwest NSW, a drone and a ground vehicle fitted with LiDAR are mapping pasture in 3D, and the crew checks every reading against hand-cut, weighed samples. The software was first built to measure vine canopies with Wine Australia, and MLA is co-funding the pasture version.
Lasers can't tell live grass from dead, so cameras and radar are being added to sort green feed from dry standing matter. Dairy research cited by CSIRO says cutting pasture estimate error to 15% could lift profit by 11 to 15%. Next stop is trial sites near Townsville and Armidale, then commercial properties.
Collars That Watch Mum
Researchers are fitting GPS and movement sensors to cows and calves to work out when and why calves go missing.
CQUniversity's Mooternal project, run with the NT Department of Agriculture and Fisheries and funded by MLA, tracked cows and calves through the 2025/26 calving season at Belmont Research Station near Rockhampton and Manbulloo Station near Katherine. The goal is algorithms that flag when a calf loss happens and what led up to it.
The early surprise was cross-mothering, with cows letting calves that aren't theirs nurse. More trials run this calving season, then commercial properties get a go in 2027-28 and 2028-29, as Beef Central reports.
Overseas
Weeding Robots Go Public
Kansas-based Greenfield Robotics is selling shares to everyday investors after six years of commercial weeding.
Greenfield maps weeds with a drone first. Its BOTONY robots then follow that map and cut weeds at ground level, no chemical. The company has 82 robots in paying customers' fields across 16 states, and its 2026 season sold out.
US media quote each robot at US$36,500, working about 0.85 acres an hour, with one machine per 80 to 100 acres of row crop. We're reporting the raise, not recommending it.
Farm AI Gets the Whole Picture
FBN and Google's AI Futures Fund are building an "AI context engine" so farm AI tools stop giving generic advice.
Farmers Business Network says the engine will pull agronomy, finances, equipment and markets into one continuously updated picture for Norm, its AI advisor. Co-founder Charles Baron wants that advice tied to buying, grain marketing and finance decisions.
Baron says Google won't have access to farm data and FBN stays the custodian. First features are with early test users now, with a wider US rollout due this northern autumn. Who holds the data is the bit we'd want in writing.
Robot Dog Checks the Soil
A Saudi startup is sending a four-legged robot and a rover into paddocks to read the soil before crops show stress.
TerraSense robots measure soil moisture, pH, conductivity and nutrients while cameras check the crop. Machine learning then turns that into irrigation, fertiliser and crop health recommendations.
Pilots start in China over the next 12 months, then Saudi Arabia and Italy, on a robots-as-a-service model. TerraSense reckons growers could save 30 to 40% on fertiliser.
Tech of the Week
UV-C Crop Robots
Robots that drive the rows at night and hit fungal disease like powdery mildew with UV-C light instead of a fungicide pass. UK startup Antobot is chasing 300 units in strawberries next year, California's TRIC Robotics already treats more than 1,500 acres of strawberries, and Victoria's JP Robotics is lining up vineyard pilots with Aussie wine producers.
The Up Side: No chemical goes on with that pass, which matters where buyers worry about residues. TRIC says it prices its night-time service around what growers already pay for fungicide sprays.
The Down Side: Antobot says the early headaches are locked gates, changed access codes and tractors parked in the way. The yield and chemical-cut figures so far come from the companies, and the Victorian vineyard pilots are still measuring results.
Paddock fail
On 2 September Jeremy Clarkson reported 11 sheep stolen from Diddly Squat Farm near Chadlington, Oxfordshire, after he and Kaleb Cooper could only find 16 of his 27 Easycare sheep in a remote field. He said there was "no other explanation" than theft, and told police, "I know it's going to sound like I'm from 1856, but I've had some sheep stolen."He even told The Sun, "It's a farm. We're armed. Just so they know."
Then on 22 September, about three weeks later, Thames Valley Police closed the case. Nobody had pinched anything. Farm staff had miscounted, and every sheep was accounted for. To be fair, Clarkson had already warned us that counting sheep is "quite difficult to do without dozing off".
Can spray drones earn their place on Australian farms?
When the boom cannot get in and the plane is booked, spray drones start looking sensible. Worth a look at what they are, where they fit, what AI mapping is changing, and the CASA, label and weather caveats that still matter.
Out the Back / Sprayflyr