Hay Innovators Part 2: with Damon Humphris and Gavin Leersen

Jon Paul Driver 0:00
Welcome to the Feed Central Hay Matters podcast, your go to source for all things hay related in Australia. I’m your host, Jon Paul Driver, in today’s episode, we’re joined by Damon Humphris, and Damon’s with Taggr. I’m excited about this. I just figured out what tagger does, tell us about your product.

Damon Humphris 0:25
Yeah, so in my region, or I guess in Australia as a whole, I’m not sure about you guys, but to export hay, we’re required to put a tag in each individual bale before it goes to the exporter. So for traceability, this keeps track of the grower, the paddock, and the year that the hay was made. Normally, these tags are supplied beforehand, prior to baling, and ideally, you would tag the hay in the paddock. Normally you would, you would apply the tag with a flathead screwdriver and literally push a tag into each bale individually.

Jon Paul Driver 1:04
I’m shaking my head. I’m just thinking about some of those paddocks that I saw up, like in Hopeton in northern Victoria, that are square miles, and thinking about the number of bales and tags that you’d have to put in, this is the problem that you’re fixing.

Damon Humphris 1:19
Yeah, that’s right. It’s an insane amount of time and labor, and it’s an extra thing to think about in an already quite complex operation. It’s not uncommon for large operators in our area to employ someone full time during their haymaking just to tag hay. So I studied at a Marcus Oldham college and an ag uni in Geelong. Graduated with a Bachelor of Business. And yeah, when I came home, I got put in charge of the hay production of the farm, while the real boss, the old man, he was out contract windrowing. And, yeah, I immediately saw that this tagging hay is incredibly inefficient.

Jon Paul Driver 2:07
So we know why it exists. How does it work?

Damon Humphris 2:12
So I figured that if I was doing something 1000s of times over and over again, a robot should be able to do that. Yep. I came up with a an initial prototype, which was very, very simple. It was just a linear actuator, a 12 volt motor with some gears and a bit of a feeding mechanism. It’s funny how things work in your work really well, in your head, but in practice, it’s nothing like that that put trying to feed tags out. It’s like, it’s like pushing a snake down a hole. They say. It was quite difficult to get the tags to feed nicely, just given their inherent flexibility. I don’t know if you’ve seen the sort of tags we apply, but they’re like a plastic strip, essentially.

Jon Paul Driver 2:52
30 centimeters long, or something. I mean, yeah, something in that neighborhood.

Damon Humphris 2:55
That was probably three or four years ago. I gave up on the on the project, thinking that it just wasn’t possible. But I kept thinking about it and optimize the geometry of the feeder to the point where the tags could create their own structure as they go through the feeder, and that allowed them to feed reliably enough. And then the next step was all the other the other smaller issues, like how to feed it the right amount, the right amount for the size of tag, for example, and how to trigger the tagging cycle. All these were, in my opinion, lesser issues. So yeah, the system bolts to the side of most large capacity square balers, and requires some sort of an air supply. It’s generally going to be put on Krone balers, particularly in our area, because Krone balers are export hay balers.

Jon Paul Driver 3:56
Yeah, I think you’re right in that. Generally speaking, the high density Krone bales work better for export.

Damon Humphris 4:02
Yeah and they have an air supply on them.

Jon Paul Driver 4:07
It doesn’t just work on Krone balers, right? Any baler with an air supply will work?

Damon Humphris 4:11
Yes, yes. Or tractor with an air supply, it’s designed to nestle in between two of the ribs on the back of the chamber, so you’re sort of limited by the distance between two ribs. So you do need to check that size, but I believe Krone’s are some of the slimmest dimensionally. So no reason it shouldn’t fit on others. We run it on a Massey 2270 XD, and it works really well.

Jon Paul Driver 4:36
Is this product already to market?

Damon Humphris 4:38
It is. We’ve got limited production, and we’re focusing on on SA particularly Balco growers. Yeah, the system was designed for Balco hay, because we grow back Balco hay.

Jon Paul Driver 4:52
I’ve had the good pleasure of meeting Rob Lawson and talking with him, and good, good folks over at Balco. What’s the feedback that you’ve received from other farmers using it, what I just imagine it was praises and thank yous.

Damon Humphris 5:06
So, yeah, some of the best feedback I got was that it was more reliable than the baler.

Jon Paul Driver 5:13
In all fairness, if you’ve ever climbed the ladder to fix knotters, you know that that threshold is kind of low.

Damon Humphris 5:20
It was a brand new baler too. Tagging hay made by the other baler with or without the tagger, really sucked. Oh yeah. Also had the feedback that it was hard for large hands to get in and start the tags feeding. And since then, I’ve designed it to design the enclosure to be larger, with a larger lid to help with this, and also it was quite difficult to remove the feeder, originally taking up to 10 or 15 minutes to remove with various bolts and parts, but I’ve actually redesigned it so it’s all held in with locating pins and magnets, so you can actually remove the feeder in really a few seconds, if you ever need to. So I’ve designed it to be as easy and as simple to operate as possible.

Jon Paul Driver 6:12
Now, where do you go from here? What’s the next step?

Damon Humphris 6:17
Good question. I originally designed this for our operation because [we needed it]. Yes, that’s right. And we’re quite small hay growers, really, so I figure, well, gee, if we benefit from it, there’d be a lot of other guys that would benefit far more than us. I’m trying to get it to the point where it’s it’s somewhat scalable and marketable. So a farmer can just buy it, buy it as a kit, and fit it to his own baler, and it’ll just work. The system is quite physically large, and there are quite a few components, so at the moment, I’m assembling them myself, so that that’s sort of the limit in production at this stage, sure, but I’d rather start slowly and make sure the product is sound, yeah, as opposed to just going crazy and having problems everywhere.

Jon Paul Driver 7:15
That’s right, having two tags in one bale and not in the next and oh yeah, I could. It’s not hard to envision that not working, but that’s really cool. I like your approach. Do you have any plans for more automation technologies, or is this your focus at the moment.

Damon Humphris 7:32
This is my focus. I’m trying to make the system as simple and as robust as possible, adding to it, I think could take away from it, if that makes sense, yeah, of course, there’s elegance in simplicity. At the end of the day, we just need tags in bales, adding extra features to it, adds complication, adds cost, and you have to ask yourself, what value is it creating, and who in the supply chain, or the end consumer is going to see that value and be willing to pay more for it?

Jon Paul Driver 8:09
So in the case of Australia, where you have an export restriction, what is the thing that they’re testing for that the tags are associated with?

Damon Humphris 8:21
The tags are there for the traceability. Because the process is, you bail the hay, you tell the exporter, there’s hay in the paddock, they will send out a sampler, who will come and call your hay. They then go off and test that hay, yes, and correlate that to the paddock. So the tags are there

Jon Paul Driver 8:42
…for the whole system traceability.

Damon Humphris 8:43
That’s right.

Jon Paul Driver 8:44
I gotcha. What advice would you give farmers considering adopting automated tools like your tagger system?

Damon Humphris 8:52
I guess you need to consider what value it’ll add to your system. There’s no point just buying something for the sake of buying it. You need to put your numbers against it and make a decision that’s right for your operation.

Jon Paul Driver 9:10
If somebody wanted more information about your tagger system, where would they go? Look?

Damon Humphris 9:17
Yeah. So we have a website, www.taggr.com.au, and we’ve also got a Facebook page, and I’ve got a personal Twitter account on one as well.

Jon Paul Driver 9:35
I want to say thank you again to Damon Humphris for joining us on the podcast today. It was great to see somebody innovating on a laborious task of putting tags and export bales. So that’s like, this is really cool. I’m genuinely excited to see this roll out, and I can see there’s, there’s going to be adoption elsewhere. Absolutely wish you the best, and this is wonderful.

Damon Humphris 10:02
Thanks having me, Jon. I really appreciate it.

Jon Paul Driver 10:04
Big thanks to our guest today. This podcast is proudly presented by feed Central. We’re joined by Gavin Leersen, and Gavin has designed the BaleTime hay monitor. Welcome to the podcast. How did you come up with this?

Gavin Leersen 10:21
How did I come up with this? Well, I’m actually sheep shearer, I shear sheep. That’s my job, and hopefully to ease off that and start making the hay monitor a little bit more. But while I was shearing, I was making a timer at times how fast I can shear the sheep and and the farmer, Ronnie, his name is, he was kind of getting a little bit annoyed that I was doing that instead of shearing sheep. So he said to me, make me something that tells me to get out of bed and bale the hay. So that’s, that’s what I did. Yeah, before I become a shearer, I actually did an engineering electronics course, so I had a background knowledge of electronics.

Jon Paul Driver 11:02
Okay, so you have this background in electronics, and the farmer says, ‘Tell me when to get up and bale hay’. I sympathise with this. As I, as I said, every morning this week, we’ve been up 4 and 5am trying to catch a do. And so that was the origins of the BaleTime hay monitor. Let’s talk about what it actually does, and then we can talk about how it evolved.

Gavin Leersen 11:27
It reads the humidity in and around the hay, I suppose you’d say. And it uses just basic messages at the moment, so you’d send the message to it above. It’ll just vary on the person. Every farmer’s different you see. So, yeah, had to make it so it’s quite versatile. So everybody has different balers. Everybody likes to do it a little bit different way. It’s actually the farmer making the decision say, if they want to bail at 65% humidity, when you got it right near the hay, it’s quite directly related to air around the hay. But sometimes it’s got two sensors, so sometimes you you might want to put one underneath the hay, because you might, majority of time, you probably might even know that outside of the hay, but it’s probably sometimes the ground actually keeping the hay either moist or it’s actually keeping it dry, so it’s still reading humidity, but once you bale that hay bale, it’s kind of directly related to humidity, if you know what I mean, yeah. So you’ll figure out a percentage. So it might be like for alfalfa in America, it could be more like 75% so that’ll be more closer to 50 or 60% if you know what I mean, as I said, as I said, everybody has a different idea on how high they need to do it. So they can set that by sending your message to the phone, and they can also just check, check it. So therefore you don’t have to go to the paddock to find out. You can just look on your phone, or you can set it to alert you when it gets to that time. Then, you can go to the paddock. So in your case, I’m presuming when there was there’s no 45 degree day or 40 degree days. Yeah, I’m producing some sometimes there’s no dew then you would know not to go to the paddock at all for that night. So you could stay at home, stay in bed, sleep. Yeah, that’s right. And then sometimes it works the other way, sometimes you think there’s not going to be a dew, so you decide to stay in bed and it’ll ring you up, and you actually have to do two hours extra work than you thought you had to do. It’s not all good. It’s not all good for sleep, but it’s probably, good for your business. .

Jon Paul Driver 13:43
So we’re talking about a device the measures the humidity both ambient and in the windrow, because that’s what we’re trying to capture, is if we’re talking about days without due because I haven’t seen a dew in three weeks and I’ve been hanging the whole time, we are counting on ambient humidity to rehydrate the leaves on the Lucerne. That’s right. Okay. Now, one of the problems that I have is that the cell phone service is not really good in some of the fields where I’m at. How does your product account for that?

Gavin Leersen 14:15
Does it have any signal at all? So a message is very, very simple. It doesn’t actually need it need. You can have a very low signal or send a message compared to I am going into the cloud, but I feel it’s a lot more reliable just to sending a simple SMS message. But I do have an antenna that I can click to the box that the higher you get the antenna, the better reception you’ll get. So some cases, you can’t use the small antenna that you connect to the box. You’ll need to extend it. And as I said, the higher you get that antenna, the more likely that you’ll get a reception to send the message that the only other issue would be, do you get the message in bed? Is your house got a…Yeah, you got good signal in your bedroom. I mean, in your house. If you don’t, if you don’t get the signal on your phone, well, that the BaleTime might be sending the message out, but you’re not receiving them. So that’s another thing you have to think about, too, when you yeah, will you get the message, even if, even if I’ve got the antenna high enough, and there’s other other way to thinking, I’m guessing. Is it a little, is it quite flat where you are? Is it a little bit of hill? It’s hilly, mountainous? Yeah, hilly. So maybe you have to, sometimes use your knowledge of you might have to put it on the top of the hill and and then use your knowledge of the, maybe the different, if you know what I mean, the high spots and the low spots in the field. And you’ll probably know that the lowest spots will probably come in with the dew a little bit earlier, correct high spots. But if you got no signal, maybe you will have to work that part out yourself. Set it a bit lower, all that sort of thing. But I am looking into maybe having a LoRa, having a base station and and just shooting that message up, if you know what I mean, yeah, direct line of sight. Yeah, I haven’t done that. Just hopefully, if I’ve got, if I can retire from here, if I’ve got enough people interested, and then I’ll retire from here, and then I can spend more time on innovating. I suppose you’d say, yeah.

Jon Paul Driver 16:15
So you have these units out and about. There’s farmers using them, yeah?

Gavin Leersen 16:19
So probably, probably about 130 of them. And I just had this presentation, right? And I talk about this guy that’s called Ronnie, whoever first made it for at first, right? I sold a few. He bought his. Then he and his neighbor bought one because of him. Then their their friends bought them. I was selling them sort of locally, that way, not really advertising that much, and then that sort of eased off. So I thought, well, maybe they, they got alternatives. But I didn’t realise until now that he actually just ran out of friends. He ran out of friends, that was actually now I actually have to do the hard work of selling. It needs to go into it. Yeah, I didn’t know how hard marketing was until now. I’ve been doing these courses. It’s called farmers, the founders, yeah, and it’s… there’s a lot in it. Firstly, they wanted to find out if it’s a problem or not. So we found out it’s a problem. And then it’s talking, talking and pitching and, and, yeah, just learning how to talk and and that’s probably the being a shearer. It’s not… it’s really out of my comfort zone. So, yeah, so I didn’t sell anymore, not because my product wasn’t good enough. It was because Ronnie ran out of friends. We might need to make some more friends for Ronnie. Then I might be able to let more people know about it.

Jon Paul Driver 17:40
We can help you make friends. There’s no doubt about that. The day in the life of the farmer using the BaleTime oonitor, what does that look like? When are you setting the units out? I assume you have multiple units for multiple paddocks.

Gavin Leersen 17:53
Oh, no, no. It’s just basically, it’s might depend on how many harvests and balers you have. So if you got to, I don’t know, how many balers Do you have? Like, two, yep. So generally, if you got two, you probably have two units, and then, then you decide where you put it. So I’m guessing, like I said about before, I’m guessing there’s going to be spots that might be a little bit wetter, and others, yeah. But I’m also making an assumption that you know that so therefore you you would actually put it in the first in the right spot, in the first place. You know, it’s not like it’s teaching you how to bale. You already know how to do that. It’s just a decision. It’s just, yeah, just to help you make the right decision. They I think you should use everything. You should use the weather report. You should use your instinct. You should use your

Jon Paul Driver 18:41
The chamber, moisture monitor, your hands. I always advocate there’s no, there’s no replacing your hands for testing hay for being ready to bale.

Unknown Speaker 18:50
Except for that these people that are first made it for they don’t actually feel that hay anymore. They just bale the bale, and then they put the probe in, and then they tell me it’s right every time.

Jon Paul Driver 18:59
So well, that’s a good problem to have.

Gavin Leersen 19:02
That’s it’s kind of saying that you don’t need to, you don’t need to touch the hay anymore. And it’s also saying that someone like me, that I haven’t baled before, I’m a shearer, that possibly that I could actually go do it for them, as long as they told me when to do it or where to put the machine.

Jon Paul Driver 19:17
If you know, there you go. Yeah. Okay. What are the most common misconceptions people have about farming and farm technology? Because you come from electronics background, where do the farmers misunderstand what you’re trying to do?

Unknown Speaker 19:32
The real advantage of me, actually, me, actually making this work is I’m a shearer, so I can actually talk to farmers. I know what their problem is, because I can, I understand them. But when, when technology people sometimes pople sometimes talk to farmers. They don’t understand each other. They kind of talk a different language, if you know what I mean, where I’m kind of, I’m kind of in the middle so I can sort of talk. I’m not as smart as them, other technology people, but I’m probably, I shouldn’t use this word smart, but I don’t know… as I’m not as knowledgeable as them, technology people, but I’m also more knowledgeable than a farmer. So the general that I understand when you’re talking about what’s a misconception is sometimes the technology people do not understand the real problem. What the farmer the real problem is. But also, some of the farmers, and I’m saying farmers, compared to hay baler contractors. I don’t know if you’re a contractor. So sometimes the farmer around here actually doesn’t know enough about that. They haven’t got a knowledge about their hay as much, and they put a bit of pressure on put a bit of pressure on the hay baler to bale the hay and try and get that where they they probably should learn a little bit more why the baler. bales that has to wait that certain time, I suppose you say so. If you buy a baler too dry, then it’ll break up the leaf and you’ll lose that in the paddock and lose the quality. And if you bale it too wet, then you’ll get mold in your hay bale. Yeah. Maybe the other part is, everybody thinks about the air, but not the ground. So I think you need to think about, you think you need to think about, is it a drought? Is a is the moisture and a drought? Or is it that it’s probably more the heat is the is the heat in the ground actually keeping the humidity down in the hay, in the windrow, or whether you got or is it keeping it wet? Now, most of the time what I’m not sure. I might ask you a question, how do you measure how do you know when to bale the hay now yourself like go by? So weather stations.

Jon Paul Driver 21:41
We have weather stations that are nearby, and yeah, but none of them are in my field. So we’re always using Roxy weather stations and just analysing the trends and the humidity and the timing as to when the humidity starts to go up.

Unknown Speaker 21:58
Have you measured the humidity? Have you measured the ground?

Jon Paul Driver 22:02
On our first cutting lucerne. Often the ground wicks moisture into the bottom of the windrow, and we have to flip it over and let it dry, and then we’ll go out in the mornings. This is our first cutting after we’ve flipped the windrows over and allowed them to dry, they’ll continue to wick moisture up so so then about an hour before we want to bale, when we get a little bit of dew or a little bit of humidity, we can go out there and flip those windrows one more time, or double the windrows, combine the windrows and allow that ground moisture to dissipate just before we bale.

Unknown Speaker 22:35
But there’s no measurement in that. There’s none that’s all in your in your hands, or in your gut, gut feel, or your knowledge. I suppose it’s probably more knowledge, but yeah…

Jon Paul Driver 22:46
It, no, it’s going out there and scraping your thumbnail along the stem and all of those kind of things.

Unknown Speaker 22:55
With a curedness, it could get a little bit confusing, and how, much it’s cured or not, but I still believe there’s a way we can use the tool that I’ve made to help you decide whether it’s cured or not to because if you put the sensor on it, if you put the sensor on the inside the hay, when it’s green, it’ll be a lot higher in immunity than the ambient temperature, if you know what I mean, yeah, absolutely. I just, I just haven’t had time to test that, if you know what I mean, but I’d like to test that one day.

Jon Paul Driver 23:24
You’re talking about things that you can do. What’s next for Leersen Electronics?

Unknown Speaker 23:28
Yeah, the next thing is, is actually to take this from, I would say that it’s still a prototype. So I’ve been selling 100 and I’ve sold 130 prototypes. So I’m planning to take this to the next step of making a production so when, if I do get a lot of people ringing up and wanting it, that I can actually keep up with the demand, and that’s what I’ve always been worried about, that I don’t want to advertise too much because I won’t be able to keep up with the demand, but I actually make all the circuit board myself. So I’m planning to get someone out like someone out, like I get China to make a PCB, but then I solder all the parts in. I’m planning to get it all assembled, pre-assembled, so that I can just connect it together, and then post, post it off in the mail. Any, at the moment, it’s only Australia, but it would be nice, in five years time that I’m actually posting it, posting it to you in wherever, you live Canada or something. I’m not sure.

Jon Paul Driver 24:29
I’m not very far from Canada, but I am in the States, yeah.

Gavin Leersen 24:32
So I’d love to, and that’s not really about money, either. That’s just because I it’s kind of one of my goals to be to have the best hay monitor not only Australia, but in the world, that I can help everybody, because the better quality, hay, you got it’s going to be better for animals. It’s going to be better for just everybody, really people.

Jon Paul Driver 24:51
Farm profitability, relationships with spouses, actually getting to sleep, all sorts of important things.

Unknown Speaker 24:57
Actually saying that, though one. Of the reasons I kept, kept on and persisting and making this sort of thing is the first guy I made it for Ronnie. Ronnie’s wife come up to me, and she said to me, thanks. And I said, what for? And I said, she said, oh, Ronnie, so much happier now. He’s just getting much better sleep. He’s not grumpy anymore. So that’s, one of the reasons why, why? I, why I kept working seven days a week while shearing sheep during the week and doing these things on the weekend that keep… it’s my drive. I suppose it’s not really the money. It’s just me, keeps me ticking along and keep me trying to improve it to, yeah, and some of it’s just making it hardy so it doesn’t break. You know, man, sure. And sometimes, sometimes you not sure if you have cows out there. Sometimes the cows get out there and break it, so you got to kind of make it hardy. Yeah, not all to do with the technology.

Jon Paul Driver 25:50
I really appreciate the story about the farmer’s wife. I have one of those and and she really appreciated it when I figured out how to tap into the weather stations and figure out the humidity and watching that. Yeah, it does make a huge there’s a quality of life element that’s really hard, to quantify into a business, but it really is there. This is such a cool product. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

Gavin Leersen 26:17
I talked to a lot of farmers in the shearing share, but I only talk in that’s in my area, it’s great to talk to someone else like yourself that’s in a different part of the world and learn from you, as well as that from from learning from the local farmers that I work for.

Jon Paul Driver 26:33
Gavin, thank you again for joining us today. I really enjoyed your story about seeing a need creating a solution. I can see that there’s growth and expansion on the way, and I’m excited for you and your products… this is wonderful. If you’d like more information about the BaleTime hay monitor, you can go to BaleTime.com.au, and see the product, and see the testimonials, and learn more about this awesome product. This podcast is proudly presented by Feed Central. Stay tuned in for upcoming episodes.