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From precision to autonomy The Coggan family shares their experience about a practical path to smarter farming in Queensland’s Western Downs.
By Shannon Beattie
ness. The result has been a gradual evolution from traditional precision agriculture into automation, a shift that now sees robotic sprayers running largely unsupervised across thousands of hectares. The Coggans farm 23,000 hectares at Meandarra, cropping about 13,000 hectares each year and run- ning a large livestock operation that includes 4500 cattle on feed and about 6000 lambs. It’s a business built on scale, but also on discipline. “We’re a fifth-generation farming family and we’ve been on this site since 1937,” Tom said. “We crop about thirteen thousand hectares now with fifteen full-time staff, and that grows to around twenty-five during harvest.” Running that much country efficiently has de-
When fifth-generation Queensland farmer Tom Cog- gan looked across the family’s vast cropping operation on the Western Downs, he saw a familiar challenge — not in the soil or the climate, but in people. Keeping skilled operators behind the wheel of two spot sprayers for months on end through a hot Meandarra summer had become almost impossible. “We were just struggling to keep labour units inside our spot sprayers or our camera sprayers,” Tom said. “We couldn’t keep the drivers in them for both machines running non-stop for four months straight over summer.” That pressure point — balancing efficiency with workforce limits — became the catalyst for a broader rethink of how technology could work for the busi-
Tom Coggan (left) with Jocie Bate (centre) with Phillip Coggan (right)
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