Planfarm Visit

This May, CEI:AgER were fortunate to host the PlanFarm team who were interested to tour the Shenton Park Field Station, and learn about the innovative Agricultural research occurring at the facility. PlanFarm work with over 500 farm businesses across Australia, offering services such as farm business consulting, agronomy, grain marketing and financial consultancy.

The tour kicked off at the CEI:AgER prototyping workshop before treating the visitors to some of the Centre’s active research and development project work.

Image from left: A/Prof Andrew Guzzomi & Weed Chipper; Dr Stuart Watt & test rig

Director A/Professor Andrew Guzzomi talked about the Weed Chipper for fallow weed control and progress being made on its commercial readiness. Then, moving outside, Dr Stuart Watt explained the concept of the novel targeted tillage device for in-crop inter-row weed control in row-cropping systems and provided a demo of the device.

Next stop it was all about the world’s most widely grown annual pasture legume, subterranean clover (or sub clover). PhD candidate Ruby Wiese explained how this project aims to develop new approaches for swathing sub clover, to improve the efficiency and reduce the environmental impacts commonly associated with the existing vacuum harvesting methods.

Professor Walsh, an expert in weed science and weed control, was last up, explaining the investigation into several innovative non-chemical weed control systems. For example, using a directed energy system to target weed seeds in chaff.

PlanFarm’s visit to the Shenton Park Field Station and CEI:AgER was an excellent opportunity to build and strengthen connections between their staff and agricultural researchers at UWA, with the promise of exciting future collaborations.

Delegates from Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil, visit CEI:AgER

Visit from Kimberley Rangers