Speaking at next month’s Precision Agriculture Workshop in Ingham will continue an ongoing link the CSIRO’s Dr Rob Bramley has with the sugar industry.
In the late 1990's, Dr Bramley was involved in early work which sought to apply precision agriculture in sugarcane production systems.
Industry circumstances at the time meant that this work did not proceed but Dr Bramley is now once again leading research which seeks to equip the sugar industry with the expertise to extract both value and environmental benefit from the use of precision agriculture approaches.
Last year he was recognised for his extensive work, winning the 2017 President's Medal for Research by the Australian Society of Sugar Cane Technologists, along with fellow researchers, Jackie Ouzman and David Gobbett for a paper entitled: Is district yield potential an appropriate concept for fertiliser decision making?
Dr Bramley is the author of more than 300 papers and other articles including 51 in refereed international journals and has been an invited speaker at international and industry meetings on many occasions.
Dr Bramley said he believes precision agriculture should be regarded as a generic approach to crop production in which spatial information about the production system is used to make better management decisions than would be possible without that information. He is also exploring opportunities for location-appropriate management in the sugar sector through the use of data collected by sugar mills.