13/09/2026
For Jess Koch, like many growers in southern Australia, the 2026 grain-growing season started as one of extremes – some of the best-ever opening rains alongside global unrest fuelling unstable markets and high input prices.
In these circumstances, precision agriculture (PA) – and particularly variable-rate technology – has been an invaluable tool, helping direct inputs such as fertiliser to where they provide the highest value, prioritising feeding the crop in the most productive areas.
Jess farms at Booleroo and Georgetown in South Australia’s Upper and Mid North with her husband, Joe. She says the significant potential upside to the season, combined with higher costs, meant there was a fine balance to strike for growers still bruised by a tough season 2 years earlier.
"We were all still recovering from 2024, which was one of the worst in 100 years for rainfall, so the last thing we wanted when we actually got moisture was not to feed the crop," says Jess.
In a high-cost environment, it was critical that any inputs were reduced strategically to save money while not sacrificing yields.
“If you were going to cut back by 20%, you needed to cut back in an educated and structured way,” she says. “You couldn’t just shave 20% off the whole program.”
As both a grain grower and a PA consultant running her own business, Breezy Hill Precision Ag Services, Jess has a keen insight into how data-driven technology can inform such strategies.
Variable-rate technology – automatically adjusting rates of seeding, fertilisers and other inputs based on prescription maps drawn from yield data, soil tests and satellite imagery – is a tool she employs for herself and her clients.
Facing 2026, her first step was to go back to the spreadsheets and look at every paddock and soil test to identify where inputs would provide the greatest value: “We were looking at ways to cut back without trimming off any yield potential,” she says.
Drawing on ‘Agronomy 101’, they changed their fertiliser blends, adding more nitrogen upfront than usual to productive areas, to ensure the crops made a good start if inputs later became scarce.
With the cost of phosphorus fertilisers such as monoammonium phosphate rising fast, phosphorus soil tests were scrutinised and correlated with high pH zones to identify deficient areas most in need.
“Calcareous areas are inefficient at using phosphorus, so we didn’t want to cut the rate back there,” she says.
Off-farm, Jess is also disseminating knowledge about how PA can guide inputs for profitability through the Red Hill Precision Ag Soils Focus Group, a 12-month GRDC investment.
Working with Upper North Farming Systems, she is running workshops and a demonstration paddock to build capacity among young growers to better manage variability using PA tools.
She says she wants to educate more people about how to apply PA technology because, along with providing economic benefits, it can help make hard decisions easier. This is particularly useful in times of stress or uncertainty, such as 2026.
"Precision agriculture helps to take the emotion out of decision-making,” she says. “If you know you’ve made decisions with facts and logic, then you can at least sleep at night knowing you’ve used solid information as your basis."
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