Daniel Bell grew up on a farm and, from a young age, he was passionate about the industry and how technology was impacting on it.
The 21-year-old is a field technician at Precision Agriculture, and has been based at its Ballarat office.
He joined the team last November after graduating from a Bachelor of Agricultural Sciences at the University of Adelaide.
He came from a mixed farm at Brim, north of Warracknabeal in the Wimmera, where the family had broadacre crops and some sheep.
“Growing up on a farm, I was always around it and I loved farming from early on,” Daniel said.
He said it wasn’t until after his final VCE exams that he considered studying agricultural sciences.
“I’m glad I did it,” Daniel said.
Through the program GradLink, which helps prepare agriculture and agribusiness graduates a connect them with people in the industry, Daniel was offered the graduate role at Precision Agriculture.
“It’s an awesome program that makes it easy for agriculture students to get their name out there and fins a suitable job.”
For the past four or five months, Daniel has been doing a lot of grid soil sampling and EM38 soil surveying – which gives a rapid measure of soil electrical conductivity.
Daniel said these data sets could help growers manage different zones within a paddock.
“From here we can effectively set up variable rate applications of resources such as gypsum, lime and more recently nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium.”
He said he was impressed by the impact using this data could make on resource management, for example with variable rate lime, they could spread more lime on the more acidic area to help unlock nutrients and ultimately increase yield potential of these areas.
“Cost saving are a cherry on top,” Daniel said.
Daniel estimates about 60 to 70 per cent of Precision Agriculture’s work in Victoria is around the Skipton and Streatham areas and he’s enjoyed working on these area’s farms that have an interesting mix of cropping and grazing.
He’s also spent three weeks in Tasmania and a week on Kangaroo Island and he said precision agriculture could be applied to a wide range of different farming systems. He’s worked on varied projects from hops production to vegetable growers and vegetable seed developers.
“We have to understand the latest technologies and use them to improve people’s farming systems and achieve meaningful outcomes on-farm.”
He said it was exciting to be part of a growing team.
At Precision Agriculture, Daniel’s day to day boss is Brendan Torpy, the company’s lead advisor for southern Australia.
“I’ve learnt a heap off him in the past six months,” Daniel said. “It’s ridiculous.”
Daniel wants to progress to an advisor role in the future and sees a long and fruitful career in the field.
His optimism expands to the agriculture industry more broadly.
“Ever since I’ve been involved (with agriculture), it’s been a growing industry and if you’re passionate about agriculture and are willing to work hard, there’s strong networks filled with great people.”
