Ken Wilson, a veteran Western Australian farm machinery writer well known in the industry across the country, has hung up his notebook and camera.
After 54 years as a journalist - the last 26 of them writing specifically about agricultural machinery - Mr Wilson retired last week.
And he left with his own degree in agriculture, considering WA's Wheatbelt to be his "university" and the multitude of farmers he has talked with as his "professors".
"Everything I know about agriculture I learned from granddad and dad (growing up on the family farm near Cunderdin) and through talking to farmers - and I'm still learning, that's the most exciting bit," he said.
His awards included seven from the Rural Press Club of WA, Fairfax Rural Awards for Best On-Farm story in 2011 and 2013 and the Farm Machinery and Industry Association (FMIA) John Lynn Memorial Award for excellence in the farm mechanisation industry in 2015.
While the recognition was valued, what he cherished most were the thousands of personal friendships formed across the full agricultural spectrum throughout regional WA.
"One of the greatest things I have enjoyed about this game is the genuineness of the people I meet - the farming people are just genuine, wonderful people," Mr Wilson said.
While renowned for occasional battles with office technology and expenses accounting system changes, Mr Wilson had an ability to understand extremely complex mechanical, electronic and automated systems in agriculture.
He has watched as broadacre machinery has trebled in horsepower, size and capacity and in many cases gone from tow-behind PTO-driven to self-propelled, self-steered and with primary functions automated to minimise operator error.
Mr Wilson covered the introduction and evolution of technology - some simple like tungsten points, some complex like direct-drill seeding - that at the time was quite literally ground breaking and brought changes but is now such an accepted part of farming it hardly rates a second thought.
He believes the technological advances will continue.
"I would say within 10 years we are going to be seeing hybrid automation, we'll still see cabs with operators in them but they'll have primarily a monitoring role - we are already seeing driverless tractors.
"In the mid-1970s John Shearer brought out a hydraulic chisel plough - that was an absolute breakthrough that really ushered in hydraulics.
"The next big thing I think will be electrics that will replace hydraulics.
"We've already got hybrid electric over hydraulics but full-blown electrics will be the next thing, so it will be electric tractors - they'll be the prime movers."
Big horsepower diesel motors, already facing a limited foreseeable future in Europe, were likely to be replaced by electric motors, not just in tractor wheels but also the wheels of implements with motors linked as one by electronics, he said.
Rather than machines continuing to grow in the size, electronics will link teams of machines working together, he said.
"That's already happening in the United States, it's called the master and slave system so the lead tractor sets the position in the paddock for the rest," Mr Wilson said.
"You will have three, four, five headers taking a crop off in one paddock, then all leaving that paddock and going down a laneway to start the next paddock - farms will be specifically designed for that.
"With spraying you won't need these 120 foot (36.6 metres) or 160ft (48.5m) booms, it'll go back to almost insect-like machines that can get down low in the crop and go between the rows and just spray specific targets and they'll be operating 24 hours, seven days a week.
"Already there's a company that has developed what they call a beehive - you put it in a central position on the property and the drones come out of it, fly to the designated paddock, do their job and return to the beehive to be resupplied.
"At the end of the day, despite all of the education, all of the information, all the technology we now have, 95 per cent of the (agricultural) equation is rain - how much and when," he said.
"We are going to need the CY O'Connors of the next decade to look at things like damming of the Fitzroy River (in WA) and seeing how we can get water down from Kununurra (the Ord) for a move into pivot irrigation.
"It may mean the area below the Fitzroy becomes the new Wheatbelt for WA.
"There has to be some out-of-the-box thinking by governments to start planning for this - a 40-year or 50-year plan.
"We know we have water but we've got to be clever about how we access it.
"My feeling is pivot irrigation has got to become the norm.
"It's being done in Denver (in the US) and to a certain extent Twiggy (Andrew Forrest) and Gina (Gina Rinehart) are starting to do that up north.
"You can't eat iron ore."
Mr Wilson witnessed the demise of many Australian manufacturers - some of them with histories going back more than 100 years - during his time.
"We had Australian companies that were leading the world, companies such as Napier Grasslands and Connor Shea - there's some argument about who was first - which developed the first air seeder in the world, later copied by the Canadians," Ken said.
"We were making our own tractors - Chamberlain had a big following throughout Australia - we made our own combines - Horwood Bagshaw, John Shearer, Connor Shea, Napier Grasslands - and on a lot of that stuff the US was still playing catch-up.
"We were fairly self-sufficient in our manufacturing of machinery but cost pressures and our lack of critical mass finally took its toll.
"While it took some time for the likes of Massey Ferguson and Ford at that stage, International Harvester, New Holland and John Deere to come in - it was almost like bracket creep with the volumes those companies had the ability to supply and that knocked Australian manufacturing for six."
