Hay Innovators Part 1: with Louis Kelly and Bryce Riddell

Jon Paul Driver 0:05
Welcome to the Feed Central Hay Matters podcast. Your go to source for all things hay related in Australia. I’m your host, Jon Paul Driver in today’s episode, we’re joined by Lewis Kelly. Louis is the chair of AFIA. We’re going to talk about some of the goings on at the AFIA conference. I’ll start by welcoming you to the podcast. Would you tell us a little bit about where you’re from and your farming operation really quick?

Louis Kelly 0:30
Yeah, I’m from the bottom part of New South Wales, Southern Riverina. Predominantly, where I live is an irrigation district, Jerilderie is the closest town of about 700 people, and it’s in a triangle between Wagga, Albury, Shepparton, sort of thing, about 300 kilometers north of Melbourne. I think everyone knows where Melbourne is, over the new over the New South Wales border.

Jon Paul Driver 0:58
And what do you grow there?

Louis Kelly 0:59
Yeah, no, I’m predominantly focused on fodder. At the moment I’ve got a lot of clover for hay production and oats for the export market.

Jon Paul Driver 1:12
We’ve talked to Damon Humphris with taggr Gavin leersen with BailTime, and Bryce Riddell with HayShepherd, and they all presented at AFIA. And I want to highlight, how does AFIA collaborate with innovators and technologists to bring new solutions to AFIA’s members?

Louis Kelly 1:30
A lot of stuff just happened because of necessity, and it’s the same as their inventions. Necessity is the mother of invention. These three guys, have come along, and they’ve all got something to add to our industry. The HayShepherd, it’s almost a must now that we’re going to have more and more technology monitoring our hay sheds, in extreme cases with our insurance across the industry, people are finding they’re getting quotes for as much as 6% of the net value of the product they’ve got insured. That is unacceptable. We have to insurance companies. They’re sort of saying too high risk. We start to use Bryce’s technology in the top of a hay shed. It really opens your mind as to what, Hey, hang on, what’s out there? What can we do with this? Gavin with these… And I know that might probably appeal to me, and I’m trying not to blow that one up too much, because I’m going down the paddock to find out just how the hay is ready or not, because I’m the guy driving the baler. And that is such a convenience that if you could just go to bed and wait till the alarm went off instead of getting up every hour to go and have a look.

Jon Paul Driver 2:51
I’ve been living that this week, we’re trying to bail our second cutting Lucerne, and it’s exactly as you described, getting out of bed to go.

Louis Kelly 3:02
That hit really well. And of course, the bale tagger well that’s just endless, the possibilities there. We can GPS the paddocks. We’ve got all that equipment in our in our tractors, and we know exactly what part of the paddock that bail came from, and it raises the question, are we potentially offering too much technology that we’re going to be overloaded with from these guys? But look, there’s a use for the whole lot of them. And as I say, necessity is the mother of invention, and they are all very necessary.

Jon Paul Driver 3:41
So what role do you see innovation playing in the future of farming and hay production?

Louis Kelly 3:45
I think through my lifetime in farming, I keep going back to the late 80s and 90s, where we had, in Australia, particularly, we had a changing of the practices of farming by the innovation of minimum till and chemical revolution to the agriculture. Now I maintain that that was 100% game changer. That was a real innovation of magnitude, that we’ve totally changed our practices altogether, increased our efficiency hugely, I think the future, we can’t keep looking for rainbows like the minimum till and the chemical revolution. They’re rainbows that we don’t we’re not going to see those things again. The future is the innovation of what these three guys have done. These little one percenters, or half a percenter to your product or to your your operation, is going to make a hell of a difference in the future, and we need more and more of them so that we can keep adapting them and after 10-15, years, we’ll be making 100% game changers with all these little innovations. And that’s why I say these three guys should be congratulated for what they’ve brought to the table at AVIA this year, it’s been fantastic. And the way, they’re not trained presenters or trained media people. They’re just…

Jon Paul Driver 5:24
My favorite part working with all three of them is they’re real people solving real problems.

Louis Kelly 5:29
Yeah, now I fully agree there, and to talk to them individually, you think, wow, there’s going to be a lot of innovation coming from a lot of people eventually.

Jon Paul Driver 5:39
The last question I have for you, looking forward, what emerging technologies or trends are you most excited about?

Louis Kelly 5:44
I haven’t seen them yet. I don’t know what’s out there and that, I believe you got to keep your mind open for, many years ago I heard about the microwaving of the soil or the plants as they germinated and I thought, wow, this is going to be one to watch. But there’s a lot of problems. You know, how far do you keep the driver away from the open door of the microwave. And going across the paddock. And, I was really impressed with that thinking that will get developed to it, but look, that’s gone by the wayside a bit. I don’t know, and that’s why I have to say in my life, I was told, when I was a young bloke, don’t ever set expectations, this is what you’re going to see. I was in a tractor lasering a paddock, and this is in the early 80s, and my grandfather was 86 and he was in there with me. And he was born in 1900, I explained to him that transmitter sending a beam, and it’s controlling what I’m the level I’m working at here, and the tops are all the one level, and the bottom is one level. And I’m thinking, How much do you actually understand this path? And his comment when I stopped talking, which isn’t very often, as people would tell you, he said, if you see in your life what I’ve seen in my life, you have got no idea what you’re going to see. It’s just uncomprehendable. Was the word that he used, there wasn’t even septic when he was a kid, how things have changed so much.

Jon Paul Driver 7:25
My great grandfather came across the U.S. for the first time in a covered wagon and lived to see the moon landing.

Louis Kelly 7:31
Exactly. And that’s, that’s what this guy was talking about. And, in those days, I was spending a lot of time earth moving and developing country and harvesting different crops and all the things that we did in those days. I keep just as busy now, but it’s not behind the wheel of tractors like I used to so you had a lot of time to think, and I’ve quite often pondered over that and listening to these three guys over the last couple of days, I really think they’re the things that I had no idea that was ever going to come. Now, when you ask me what’s out there in the future, I don’t know how these things work internally, because my mind’s a mechanical mind that I could dismantle it to see how it works. I just trust this stuff works.

Jon Paul Driver 8:25
Could I get you to give a commercial for AFIA? I’m a big fan of industry organizations, because it does take that collaboration.

Louis Kelly 8:33
I truly believe that if people want to come, we’ve got to make ourselves attractive to people to want to come. It’s a lot easier if they want to come and preferenced us, dragging them in. So we’ve got to make ourselves as a go to group, and the face of AFIA needs to be a part of that go to group. Look, it’s not just the members that we need. It’s a complete cycle. We need the sponsors. Tim Ford, classic example, he’s actually an industry innovator with what he’s done since I’ve known him, and he’s kept moving with the times and kept setting the pace. A lot of our sponsors are people like that as well, we’ve got to acknowledge what Tim has done. Bit hard to put in words, because I haven’t actually tried before, but I think if Tim’s out there taking his business forward, and he’s prepared to take the rest of the fodder industry forward with him, so we need to work together With that collaboratively. That is how we need to work, and when we figure out that we can actually compliment each other and we’re not actually in opposition to each other. Now, whether Tim actually has figured this out, or his staff actually figured this out, I don’t know, but subconsciously, that’s what they’re doing. We’ve got to embrace that stuff. We’ve got to take that further forward. As you can probably tell, I left school at the end of year eight. I used to say I left at the end of second form, but it sounds a lot more educated if I say year eight. I can read and write, but I can’t spell very well. I acknowledge all that. I can’t tell you why people decided, hey, give me good bloke to chair this job. I know I’ve got a lot of passion for the industry. I’ve made a lot of money out of the industry, so I only think that I’m putting back into the industry. That’s answering the question you’re after.

Jon Paul Driver 10:32
I love the collaborative spirit there, and then that spirit of innovation too. That’s really what the conversations with Damon Gavin and Bryce were all about was capturing that spirit of innovation in the future of the industry.

Louis Kelly 10:47
We’ve got to keep chasing them, they’re 100% game changers. They’re just not going to be out there anymore. I don’t think, I may be wrong.

Jon Paul Driver 10:55
Louis, this has been a wonderful conversation, talking about how AFIA supports and collaborates with industry innovators. I think having those innovators come and speaking at the conference makes the conference more attractive to everybody in the industry, and it just turns into a wonderful feedback loop where you have good people and good content meeting with other good people. It’s wonderful. And I wanted to say thank you for your commentary today. It really highlights the need for that, again, collaboration.

Louis Kelly 11:25
Any time, I do appreciate the opportunity to say a few words, but acknowledge that I’ve been watching you and how you’ve done some of these podcasts, and I do appreciate what you’re doing and how you help promote the fodder industry, and that’s what Tim’s doing. That’s what Tim’s business is about. But as I said before, we’re moving forward together. That is what I believe, that collaboratively means that to me, it’s what we’ve got to do. It’s a future.

Jon Paul Driver 12:01
I’ve been joined by Lewis Kelly, Chair of AFIA, talking about technology at the AFIA conference. We’re joined by Bryce Riddell. Bryce is with multi cube and Yarrow Wanga, but he also is a bit of an innovator. That’s an understatement. I’ve been to Bryce’s operation in Yarrawonga, and there is innovation everywhere, but we’re going to talk about a specific one at the AFIA conference, you presented on your HayShepherd product. Tell us what HayShepard does.

Bryce Riddell 12:33
The way that hey Shepard got developed is we had an internal need in our own company, and we were requested by our insurance company about two years ago to start monitoring our hay sheds for 30 days after harvest. And like any true agricultural entrepreneur or innovator, I went about solving that problem. So the first way that we solved it was with a temp gun and a notebook. And we had to send people. Yeah, good old fashioned pen and paper,

Jon Paul Driver 13:04
pen and paper, like, yeah, like you see at restaurants where they’re writing down to the food temperature

Bryce Riddell 13:10
100%, it was very basic. And then, you know, you had to really get to the shed before the sun had come up, so that you didn’t have any interference with the radiant heat from the sun distorting any of the measurements in the apex of the roof, because that’s what you were trying to capture. You were trying to capture a difference in the temperature in the apex of the roof versus that of the temperature of one of the columns. So that was more so your control, of the control reading.

Jon Paul Driver 13:39
The idea being, if bales are heating in the shed, potentially causing a fire, the heat would rise to the apex of the shed roof.

Bryce Riddell 13:46
Correct, so if you’ve got a situation developing in the shed, you’re going to have that heat rise. And we’re looking for with the temp gun, we were looking for a small temperature variation, which would give us an indication that you had something developing in that shed. So after around about two weeks, what happened is, I thought, there has to be a better way. So I started to research all the other tech options out there on the market. And some of them, have their place but for what we were actually trying to do none of them were actually fit for purpose for the task that we had at hand. After looking around for a few weeks, I thought, if we’ve got this problem, I’m sure other people have the same problem. So I set about finding a tech solution and developing a tech solution that solved the issue. And that’s when I came up with, HayShepherd. So it was fairly innovative where there’s nothing else like it on the market. What I know is that for it to work for us, it has to be simple, it has to be pretty robust, it can’t be in the way of telehandlers, loading and unloading sheds. All the boxes that I had to tick for us, they actually ticked the boxes for all other hay producers as well. So that’s what I ended up coming up with, the HayShepherd monitoring system.

Jon Paul Driver 15:11
Now, you’re saying a system. It’s not a single device, but it is a small device that you hang in the shed roof, and maybe one outside, if I remember this right, you have to put one outside as your baseline. And then you can put several throughout large sheds.

Bryce Riddell 15:28
correct, what the idea is, the minimum coverage is one, one device per bay of the shed. And then you’ve got your control device, which hangs on one of the columns of the shed, you know, at the front, so that if there is a developing situation, it’s not skewed out or anything like that the measurements. But you’re not restricted to one device per Bay. If you’ve got a larger spanning Bay, you can put up to three devices across that Bay, so that you can then pinpoint where exactly in the shed you may have a situation developing.

Jon Paul Driver 16:03
Now, to be very clear, we are talking about bales heating up and spontaneously combusting. Yeah, like the worst thing that can happen to a hay farmer.

Bryce Riddell 16:13
100% and if you’ve ever seen a shed that is on the limits of spontaneously combusting, you’ve got a lot of humidity, it’s near on raining inside of that bay of the shed. So the humidity is there, the temps there, and these are the environmental elements and factors that the system is looking for. And then the algorithm in the back end is comparing all these measurements to see if there is any difference between the control and the monitoring device.

Jon Paul Driver 16:47
Now this, this information is being sent to, I’d imagine a cloud service where you can go and access the data, look at the temperature and humidity graphs, it tracks humidity in the sheds too.

Bryce Riddell 16:59
Yep, so it’s all hosted on AWS. So it’s a very secure platform. We hold the data there for up to two years, so that if you have to go back and download some data to show your insurance company or something like that, there’s no risk that you don’t have that data. So we’re ticking the box for the requirement set out by the insurance company to monitor and record the hay for 30 days, with the added bonus of checking for environmental changes.

Jon Paul Driver 17:35
Yeah, absolutely. So this started with the insurance requirement, but also there’s peace of mind that comes along with it too.

Bryce Riddell 17:42
Exactly, because, like most of us in hay season, we’re all extremely busy. So the likelihood of getting back to that, to that shed every single day to look at it, you start to really risk that, everyone’s busy. And one of the biggest issues that we all face these days is manpower and labor shortages. So this picks up, picks up the saw points there.

Jon Paul Driver 18:12
100%, I love this innovation. Do you also get alerts sent to your phone? I’d imagine with AWS, you can set up alerts.

Bryce Riddell 18:21
You do so you have the alerts inside the user interface, but you can also get the email alerts sent to you as well.

Jon Paul Driver 18:31
And are those thresholds that you set yourself, or a part of an algorithm that you developed?

Bryce Riddell 18:38
so you can set the threshold to wherever you want it to be, so that you can set it as low as you want, but you can also set it as high as you want. So it’s really where you feel that crossover point is going to be, where an issue is really occurring. So I’d recommend two degrees Celsius, so that you…

Jon Paul Driver 19:02
Difference between the measurements.

Bryce Riddell 19:04
Exactly, so you want to set it is small as possible, so that you’re picking up on that variation as soon as possible.

Jon Paul Driver 19:15
So it’s not a particular temperature threshold that you’re looking at. It’s a differential.

Bryce Riddell 19:20
Exactly, because if you’re looking for temperature every single day varies, you’ve only got to have a, you know, super warm day, and then that’s going to skew your temperatures out. That’s why we’re working in comparing a control temperature to the monitoring temperature.

Jon Paul Driver 19:35
Yeah, perfect, this is a great innovation. When is this coming to market?

Bryce Riddell 19:40
So we’re in market now. As of this week, we’re in market so by all means, jump on the website, which is www.hayshepherd.com.au, and send us a contact form.

Jon Paul Driver 19:54
Awesome, that’s, where I was headed next.

Bryce Riddell 19:58
Perfect.

Jon Paul Driver 19:59
Well, if that’s if that’s all, we’ll put a bow on this and call it good.

Bryce Riddell 20:07
Perfect. Thanks for your time, Jon.

Jon Paul Driver 20:28
Bryce, thank you for sharing about Hay Shepherd today, again, I’ve been joined by Bryce Riddell with Hay Shepherd Multi Cube, and I’m sure several other businesses, definitely a leader and innovator in the hay space. It’s been wonderful visiting with you today. This podcast is proudly presented by Feed Central. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes.