West Australian citrus businesses were asked questions about their use of digital tools as part of the industry tour. Here are some of the responses.

• Saving time is a big incentive. I don’t have time to run around between sites turning irrigation on and off. There are so many other jobs that also need doing.

• It means I can also go on holiday with the family and know that I will get an alert that I can check while I’m away.

• I want to know how much water I should put on for my orchard as accurately as possible.

• There’s a lot of data coming in; it would be good to be able to see the data in a meaningful way.

• There’s a lot of double handling of paperwork and delays because of having different sites.

• Improving accuracy and occupational health and safety are what we are aiming to get out of the tool, as well as time saving.

• Installations make attractive to investors.

• Weather stations on site for calculating irrigation scheduling.

• Soil moisture probes at 10–30cm and 80cm for assessing whether scheduling is right.

• Electrical conductivity (EC) meter.

• Sap flow meters to see what’s happening in the tree: early research.

• Dendrometers to see trunk and fruit growth: early research.

• Monitoring and control systems (collect data and control irrigation system).

• Dashboards to present data in a meaningful format.

• Score card using Excel spreadsheet to produce packout reports.

• Remote imaging for crop forecasting and tree stress (satellite’s, planes, drones).

TABLE 1. A COMPARISON OF TOOLS USED FOR IRRIGATION MANAGEMENT

Some of the factors to consider for the irrigation management tools are listed in Table 1.

Connectivity was also a factor to be considered when installing sensors to take advantage of the time efficiencies gained from remote data download.