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INNOVATION IN PRACTICE
Australian farmers are key to the energy transition
By Shaun Westcott
From already feeding the world to now also potentially saving it, Australian farmers are in a unique position to harness advanced automotive and renewal energy technologies to both lift their on-farm productivity and profitability while also combatting climate change.
road system. On the electric vehicle front, the future is closer but still not fully within reach, especially for farmers. Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) have yet to provide prac- tical solutions for rural Australia. While there are a few electric utes on the market, their high cost and limited range — especially when towing — make them impractical. One electric ute boasts a range of 410 kilometres, but when towing a 3,200 kilograms trailer, that plum- mets to just 140 kilometres. And it costs well north of $100,000 – that’s not middle Australia. Until there’s a major breakthrough in battery technology, internal combustion utes and hybrids will remain the most viable option for farmers and tradies. An exciting technology currently
and trees while navigating fields. The advantage of farm ma- chinery is that it operates in a controlled environment. For pas- senger vehicles, the challenge is greater. While many modern cars are already capable of some ele- ments of “self-driving” such as Forward Collision Mitigation and other Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, legislation and the com- plexity of public roads hold back this potential. Cars do not yet com- municate with each other or with infrastructure like traffic lights, making autonomous driving on public roads still considered a high- risk proposition. For this technol- ogy to be adopted more broadly, governments globally need to in- vest in smart infrastructure that can support the algorithms and data demands of a fully connected
Australia’s, and indeed the world’s, current focus on the energy transi- tion is essential, as climate change remains one of our greatest chal- lenges. The future will undoubt- edly feature mostly autonomous, battery-powered vehicles. But as science fiction author William Gib- son famously said, “The Future Has Arrived — It’s Just Not Evenly Dis- tributed Yet.” Growing up on a farm in South Africa, I dreamed of future technol- ogies while driving anything with a steering wheel and a gearbox from a young age. Fast forward to 2025, and amidst all the buzz around futuristic self-driving cars, Aus- tralian farmers have quietly been using autonomous technology for years. Autonomous tractors, for ex- ample, are highly effective at map- ping farms and avoiding fences
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