• 28-year-old farmer Emma Ayeliffe created a social app last year that connects farmers across the country.
• She thinks the next generation in Australian agriculture needs to be diverse, from metropolitan Australia, and to bring more tech and engineering skills into the space.
• “We need to be able to build a reputation that showcases what we do well, not just what is really hard about what we do,” Ayeliffe told Business Insider Australia.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

Farming can be quite a lonely job, particularly if you’re a small operator, according to Emma Ayeliffe, winner of the 2021 Young Farmer of the Year.

“I’ve got a lot of clients that are single man operations who might go three or four days without seeing someone,” she told Business Insider Australia, adding that “having that sense of community is really important.”

So, like any millennial, she looked toward digital innovations that could help close the communications gaps in Australia’s agricultural community.

That’s what led Ayeliffe, along with her business partner, to in 2020 create Yacker, a peer-to-peer social app that connects farmers around the country.

“What that is all about is about trying to create those rural and regional communities for agriculture where guys that are baling hay at 2am in the morning can identify other farmers from all across Australia doing the same thing,” she said.

The hope is not just that farmers can reach out to one another, she explained, but that they can problem solve “even though one of them might be in Western Australia and one of them might be in Victoria.”

To build the app, Ayeliffe connected with Square, a company out of Victoria that specialises in AgTech, and won backing from a few big agricultural firms who got behind the idea.

In just over 12 months, it’s grown to have more than 600 users, with a connection facilitated every second day on the platform.

“That means nearly every second day, a grower is reaching out to another grower or consultant or someone else on that platform to solve a problem or have a conversation, which is really exciting,” Ayeliffe said.

Innovation and AgTech

Owning and running her own farm by the age of 28 wasn’t necessarily part of a master plan, according to Ayeliffe but rather the culmination of hard work and luck.

“I guess it’s kind of [a case of] right place, right time, right people around to support me,” she said.

After studying, her partner’s family were able to give the couple the backing they needed to purchase 1,700 acres at Lake Cargelligo in New South Wales’ Central West, running sheep along with wheat and canola crops.

Ayeliffe said while the experience has been a steep learning curve, it has also given her the opportunity to be at the forefront of the tech that is increasingly driving innovation within the industry.

The property is moving toward no-till farming and away from conventional cultivation, she said.

“Something that’s pretty cool is we get to use a lot of drones in our work,” she said.

“We use them for doing aerial survey and taking pictures of the crop from above” to try and work out management of things like fertilising, which enables the farm to cut down on the use of chemicals where it’s not necessary.”

“The other really cool thing that we were hoping to implement this year but it was a bit too wet this summer, is using drones to find weeds in paddocks and then when you go and spray the weeds out to try and keep the moisture in the soil,” Ayeliffe said.

“Rather than just blanket spraying spraying the whole paddock you just target spray those weeds which has got huge beneficial environmental outcomes because [you use] like 70% less chemicals.”

‘We need to be able to build a reputation that showcases what we do well’

Another facet of Ayeliffe’s master plan involves public speaking roles that seek to bridge the divide between consumer and producer.

She hopes to be part of a new generation of agricultural professionals that bring cutting edge expertise to the field.

“I think for agriculture to keep moving forward, we need to be able to attract a really diverse range of people into the agriculture industry and attract people from metropolitan Australia out here that can bring with them tech and engineering skills,” she said.

Ayeliffe thinks one major barrier to achieving this is the tendency for national stories about rural Australia to highlight the bad without shining a light on the “really exciting things that are happening and ways that the industry is moving forward.”

“To be able to do that, we need to be able to build a reputation that showcases what we do well, not just what is really hard about what we do.”

She said what is often lost in the stories that get told is that “agriculture is really exciting,” she said.

And Australia is the best at it in the world — according to Ayeliffe.

“It’s such an exciting space to be part of.”

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