Boekeman Machinery's two new faces

After an absence of nearly five years that included working in precision agriculture in Canada, he rejoined Boekeman Machinery this month as group precision farming manager, based out of its dual-brand Northam Case IH and New Holland dealership and administrative headquarters.

He is working with the existing team of precision farming specialists and technicians at Boekeman Machinery dealerships and with Case IH customers at Dalwallinu, Wongan Hills and Dowerin branches, Case IH and New Holland customers at the Northam branch and New Holland customers at Boekeman's new Brookton branch.

Mr McGuckian was previously a precision farming specialist at the Northam branch for Boekeman Machinery for more than four and a half years - from 2014 to 2019 - so will be known to many customers across the Central Wheatbelt and Avon Valley.

Furthering his farmer contacts, he was also precision farming territory manager for Western Australia for CNH Industrial, importer and distributor of Case IH and New Holland machinery, between leaving Boekeman Machinery and heading to Canada.

Born in Ireland and a general electrician by trade like his father and grandfather, Mr McGuckian came to Australia as a backpacker in late 2009 and found work as a farmhand at Chilwell Farms, Condingup near Esperance, a 30,000 hectare enterprise owned by Andrew and Marie Fowler.

"Through a mutual friend I got a job there during seeding and working on a large farm - I was always keen on new technology - so the experience excited my interest in agriculture and the opportunities precision farming presented," Mr McGuckian said.

It was a life-changing experience.

He stayed at Chilwell Farms for almost five years before he and partner Bec decided to move to Perth to be close to her family and about that time Boekeman advertised for a precision farming specialist so he applied and got the job.

Then, in October 2021, he and Bec decided to go to Canada so she could follow the rodeo circuit and Mr McGuckian found himself back working as a farmhand.

But this time on the Douglas Lake cattle ranch, Canada's largest cattle ranch in British Columbia, the westernmost province between the Pacific Ocean and Rocky Mountains

"I was the main farm operator there, I did all the seeding and harvest for them for six months and then we decided to move to (neighbouring province) Alberta," he said.

"For a short time I worked for Rocky Mountain Equipment (RME) in Balzac, as agricultural optimisation and technical specialist - RME is mainly a Case IH dealership chain but has some combined Case IH and New Holland dealerships.

"Then I moved to New Holland dealership Vanee Farm Centre (in High River as precision farming sales and technical specialist) for the last year and four months in Canada.

"But coming out of COVID and the farming lifestyle there wasn't quite what I had enjoyed here and I always wanted to retain a role in an agricultural business, so we came back to WA at the end of June.

"Ben (Boekeman, group sales manager) and I had a good chat online before I came back, so I pretty much had a job secured when I returned," he said.

Mr McGuckian said the adoption rate for new technology in Canada was similar to Australia, with many larger enterprises moving to "sectional control, variable rate maps and higher accuracies".

"The biggest difference I saw was most Canadian cropping farmers are trying to do everything in one pass - a little tillage, air cart and seed drill at the one time," he said.

"There's very little post-seed fertiliser added and as little as possible weed control - it would be hard to find a multi-spreader or broadcasting spreader over there, they virtually don't exist.

"But generally the farming is much the same, farmers over there complain about drought, same as they do here."

But Mr McGuckian said he noticed WA farmers seemed "much more comfortable with precision farming" now than when he left.

"It used to be 'It won't work on my farm, I've got too many paddocks that aren't square' - that sort of typical argument," he said.

"I think a lot of farmers have now come around to the idea that these systems are much more advanced, they are more than capable of handling the odd shaped paddock, it's much more than just GPS and auto steer.

"A lot more people are also a lot more aware of the savings that come with precision farming.

"The margins are so tight on a farm nowadays but it's only when you start looking at things like section control, turn compensation, rate controls that you start realising where savings can be had.

"Precision farming doesn't necessarily make you any more money per hectare, but it has the capacity to shave layers of cost per hectare from farming and the more you understand it, the more layers you can shave."

While chemical and fertiliser cost reduction through more precise and targeted applications made possible by technological advances were easy to see, tightening regulations could ultimately mean precision farming technology is more widely adopted as a way of meeting environmental targets, he said.

Also, other savings are not always obvious, Mr McGuckian pointed out.

"A lot of the features available now are not used or not used to their full potential, so I see part of my role as showing and training people to understand what can be done with what they have," he said.

"Our AFS (Advanced farming Systems) Harvest Command has been on the 8250 series (Case IH combine harvesters) for quite some time now and that is one big piece of our technology that has been a big success.

"That's an in-paddock learning camera and sensors that pick up the yield and adjust the combine to its best capacity for the conditions.

"But sometimes, when it's in full autonomous mode on Harvest Command, a combine will travel slower than the operator might if he was driving manually.

"I have farmers tell me they can harvest a paddock quicker than Harvest Command.

"I explain to them I think they are looking at the wrong thing if they are looking at time, the machine is adjusting its speed to maximise yield going into the bin."

Shared online technical support made possible by built-in diagnostic telemetrics was another area where savings could be achieved with, in some instances, a phone call to a technician saving hours of machine downtime and an onfarm service fee, he said.

"Looking forward, the farmer who achieves the most margin will be the guy who is analysing his data," Mr McGuckian said.

"Some may cringe at that thought, but I think that's where dollar value is coming from."

Boekeman Machinery's first dual-brand Case IH and New Holland dealership at Northam has a new branch manager.

Darryl Verburg, who worked in sales at the Northam branch for the past 13 months, has replaced Andrew Boekeman as branch manager there after Mr Boekeman last month moved to the new Boekeman Machinery, Brookton branch as manager.

Although a qualified electrician by trade, Mr Verburg has a background in agricultural machinery.He grew up in Wongan Hills - where Boekeman Machinery started in 1968 - and his father Greg Verburg worked for McIntosh & Son in the town.

"I grew up sweeping floors after school, delivering machines with my dad and I saw the relationship he had with customers and saw the farming side of it," Mr Verburg said.

After completing his electrical apprenticeship in Wongan Hills, Mr Verburg spent 12 months on a harvest run in the United States of America.

"We started harvesting wheat in Texas - they plant corn right behind the wheat - and then we went up through South Dakota and Idaho harvesting barley, then all the way back to Taxas to harvest the corn," he said.

Back in Wongan Hills he became one of a team of four assembling imported tillage machinery before he was invited to join the McIntosh & Son sales team at Moora.

"That's where I started my career in sales - I did that for three years then I went mining," Mr Verburg said.

He worked for Hancock Prospecting at Roy Hill and Fortescue Metals Group at Cloudbreak and Christmas Creek mines in the Pilbara as a dewatering electrician.

But after working from home with wife Angela and their four young children during the COVID epidemic, he decided he did not want to return to fly-in, fly-out shift work and the opportunity to join Boekeman Machinery came up during a chance meeting with dealer principal Stuart Boekeman last year.

"Growing up in Wongan Hills I knew the Boekeman brothers - I played football with and against Stuart and I played cricket against Andrew - I knew what they stood for and what their values were," he said.

As branch manager Mr Verburg heads a team of 26 at Northam, including four in parts and four technicians, two contractors and four apprentices in the workshop.

"A big part of our (management) role is developing our people," he said.

"We understand how important training is.

"On average our technicians do one month out of 12 on training - we lose them for field work but we gain from their experience."

As an example of multi-skilling at Boekeman Machinery, sales staff recently installed under guidance of specialised AFS staff, the Trimble GPS systems they had sold and were shown how to calibrate them, Mr Verburg said.