FEATURE innovation

Meet Guy Coleman – a young West Australian innovator who is making waves globally with an open-source and low-cost weed detection and eradiction device.

Words Anna Flanders

GUY Coleman was studying medicine at the University of Western Australia when he shocked his family and friends by pulling out of his courses to instead pursue agriculture. He has since been recognised as one of the world’s brightest young minds in agtech and is now based at the University of Copenhagen, in Denmark.

Guy returned to Perth earlier this year as one of five evokeAG Future Young Leaders and presented to about 1600 people from more than 20 countries. His passion is open-source innovation and his contribution is the Open Weed Locator. This innovation, known as OWL, detects and precision-sprays weeds, lessening the amount of herbicide required. In a world where farmers are hurting from rising input costs, this is good news on two fronts – environmental and hip pocket.

Even better news is that Guy has placed this innovation on open-source website GitHub, making the technology available to anyone who wants to download the instructions, buy the components and make it themselves. It’s these types of sites and community-minded innovators who are making the latest tech available to all. Farmers can even touch base with Guy for more information or feedback.

This innovator has also been working on lasers and robotics for weed control. He has studied and worked in Sydney, the United States (University of Texas), and is now based in Europe (Denmark), and has travelled further around the world in pursuit of leading ideas on and solutions for agriculture.

Guy grew up in Perth with his mother ; however, he spent holidays with his father in Kalgoorlie and their farm at Esperance. His father has always been an early adopter of technology, and both his father and brother have been ag innovators. He remembers his father packing them into a car about 15 years ago to visit a farmer, near Lake King, who was using the latest GPS technology at the time.

“Dad became one of the first adopters of GPS. And my brother, who is seven years older than me, has always been very innovative. In 2005, he built a drone. He should have commercialised it. My Dad and brother also worked together on some tech ideas, such as individual nozzle-based application, like precision agriculture, of herbicides back in the early 2000s,” says Guy. “My brother now works with me and is very invested in software and technology.”

Now based in the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences as a Fulbright Scholar and PhD researcher, Guy is fully immersed in agtech. There are no longer any thoughts of becoming a doctor.

“I studied agriculture for fun. I didn’t really consider ag as a career path. But after doing it for a few years and having the best time studying it and really enjoying it, anatomy and medicine felt like a drag. In 2015, I took off a year and spent time travelling and working full-time as a researcher in ag. Then, in 2016, I moved to the University of Sydney to study a remote-sensing type of agriculture, such as drone-based mapping of fields.”

Since then, Guy’s research and study have taken him around the world, travelling, working, researching, and studying farming not only in Australia but also, as mentioned, the United States, and Europe.

“Agriculture has given me so many opportunities to travel and experience new areas of Australia and the world. I don’t think I would have got that in any other industry. And there is a lot of opportunity. Quite a few friends have done the Canadian harvest season, which is large-scale farming. There are also a lot of opportunities through scholarships. I think that was one unexpected thing: that agriculture is very much an international community,” says Guy.

“ Agriculture has given me so many opportunities to travel and experience new areas of Australia and the world. I don’t think I would have got that in any other industry ”

“I’d recommend for people to experience different types of farming. For me, even going to Narrabri (New South Wales) when I first went to Sydney in 2016/17 opened my mind up to a new way of farming. Experience in different farming systems is really important to understand how problems might be addressed differently in different areas,” he says.

He points to Denmark where there is a different focus on weeds and weed control. He says it’s about acknowledging that some weeds, for instance, have beneficial services to pollinators. So, in Denmark, it’s more about control, not killing every weed. It’s discovering which weeds need to be killed (because they have a detrimental impact on crop yield), and which to keep.

So where does Australia sit in tech innovation? Guy says we are doing really well in terms of development. A lot of companies in Australia, particularly in weed recognition, are doing some interesting things. However, he says, one of the big challenges is gathering enough data to start training algorithms for precision spraying. He says this is something industry should get together and focus on for the development of future tech.

He also points to the ability for agtech startups to work with farmers. He believes the industry will move faster if there’s better collaboration between farmers and startups so that startups can ground truth their products. However, he says, that would require open-mindedness and patience from both sides as sometimes there are issues when moving from the development side to the field.

“There is a lot of technology out there. However, we are still probably in the hype phase, where a lot of development is happening, but I think we’ll probably start to see that maturing over the next few years,” says Guy.

And what are his parting words for those thinking of getting into the industry? “Probably the unexpected benefit of working in the industry is the ability to travel and to get global experience. And I also just love the ability to be in front of a computer coding, then spend half a day outside in the field. That, of course, is a big opportunity.”