Australia's agriculture industry is serving as technology incubator to test new systems designed to benefit farmers around the globe.

“Large international multinational companies prospect for new technologies and ideas here in Australia, so why not try and connect those sorts of concepts where we can be testing those technologies with farmers who are innovative, who are prepared to probably put up with a little bit to make something work so that other people can benefit from that,” said professor Craig Baillie at the University of Southern Queensland.

Baillie and a team of agricultural engineers are working on smart systems including one that can irrigate crops autonomously, reflect on the job it has just done, and make the necessary adjustments to do it more efficiently the next time. He said Australia is a great place to trial a lot of such new technology.

“Our farmers tend to operate in unprotected markets and so obviously pressured by world prices that are fairly low without subsidy and so what it means is that farmers in this country tend to be more innovative, they tend to have a greater thirst for technologies,” said Baillie.

At Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, lecturer Chris Lehnert has helped to create a robot that can pick peppers from a plant. So far, the robot named Harvey has been able to remove about 75% of the fruit in a given area. While it may appear to replace human workers, Lehnert said Harvey can help solve a much broader problem.

“We are actually struggling to keep farmers in the jobs as well so farmers and growers are struggling at the bottom line about how much it costs them to grow fruit and really we are trying to give back to stabilizing that industry, the agricultural industry and making sure growers can actually maintain their systems,” he said.

Australian farmers are also benefiting from the fact that many of the new technologies are being developed with their specific geographical needs in mind.

“We know that we operate in a slightly different climate to everybody else and yet if we are receiving technologies that have been developed in other parts of the world then they still need to go through that development phase to be able to be used here,” said Baillie.